A Man Is A Rape Supporter If He Even Draws Breath, Says Psychotic Feminazi Hellbeast

Oh my shitting God.

I know I'm a little late to the dinner table over this particular feast but I saw this list - that originates at the none-more-feminist blog 'Eve Bit First' - entitled 'A Man Is A Rape Supporter If...' . Which then of course goes on to list just about every position a man could have on, well, just about anything. It's a long, exhaustive list, but includes all the following.

A man is a rape supporter, you'll be moist to know, if:

• He defends the current legal definition of rape and/or opposes making consent a defense.
• He has accused a rape 'victim' of having “buyer’s remorse” or wanting to get money from the man.
• He has ever revealed he conceives of sex as fundamentally transactional.
• He has gone to a strip club.
• He frames discussions of pornography in terms of “freedom of speech.”
• He characterizes prostitution as a “legitimate” “job” “choice” or defends men who purchase prostitutes.
• He watches pornography in which women are depicted.
• He watches any pornography in which sexual acts are depicted as a struggle for power or domination, regardless of whether women are present.
• He characterizes the self-sexualizing behavior of some women, such as wearing make-up or high heels, as evidence of women’s desire to “get” a man.
• He describes female anatomy in terms of penetration, or uses terms referencing the supposed “emptiness” of female anatomy when describing women.
• He promotes the idea that women as a class are happier or more fulfilled if they have children, or that they “should” have children.
• He argues that people (or just “men”) have sexual “needs.”
• He defends these actions by saying that some women also engage in them.

She ends the list by asking, "how many women reading this know at least one male over the age of 18 who does not fit this list. Anybody?"

And that's the point, of course: All Men Are Rapists. Or at least - in this instance - rape 'supporters', whatever that means (have you ever met anyone who said to you "Yes! I wholeheartedly support the implementation of rape on a societal level, that's exactly what this country needs. Rape is The Solution! Absolutely! Sign me up for that!"?)

What is the aim of these psychotic nazi hellbeasts? Don't they realize by calling upon such a horrific term & applying it in such hysterical & inappropriate ways, so often, all that will happen is that we, as a society, will become inured to it? It will cease to shock us. And we will all cease to care.

If the definition of rape is widened to include so many natural male/female interactions that it becomes meaningless, real rape accusations will cease to be taken seriously or believed. Societal abhorrence of rape will lessen & incidents of real rape will rise. All because some beserk & overwrought middle class white girls who know nothing about life & are troubled by their bodies got brainwashed at university by a hate cult.

There is no better example than this article of why feminism is not now, & never has been, about equality.  The fact that the other NAWALT* feminists are not up in arms against this madness & denouncing it from the highest rooftops for the genocidal madness it is shows you why the egalitarian claims of feminism mean nothing. It's a hate movement. Simple as that. Always has been. Always will be.

I don't usually like the shouty Angry Atheist youtube man but on this occasion - his analysis of said list - he's spot on, & says pretty much everything that needs to be said about it. This is a Bill Hicks level righteous indignation joy, so savour:



(* "Not All Women Are Like That")

How I Know That Something Like 90% Of The Homeless Are Men

Arguing with Feminists can more often than not get you to feeling like you're on a doorstep debating with a born-again Christian whose entire argument is 'But surely you must believe Jesus died for your sins?'

You've been there, I've been there. Let's not dwell.

The good thing about arguing with feminists is that it can occasionally force you to go away & do the research for yourself. Not that it will alter their opinion even one little bit, of course, when you present it to them, but it's good to know of what you are speaking - the evidence, the stats, the facts & the figures behind the position that you hold - rather than simply singing along with the words like everyone else.

As an example: recently I was responding to a feminist online & used the well-known (to regular readers) figure of 90% of the homeless being men. She questioned it, & I realized that, although I'd used that particular figure a bunch of times I'd never tracked it to its source before. So I took a look & thought I would list my findings here as a resource for those interested.

In the UK both the Scottish Government's Homelessness Monitoring Group's 2004 First Report To Scottish Ministers & the official homelessness statistics from CRISIS 2006 (source: p.29) give the figure as 80-90%. In North America two sources from the year 2000, Homelessness: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis by Jack Layton & Barbara Murphy's On The Street: How We Created Homelessness give the figure as 70-90%. There seems to be a little more variation in the U.S figures generally, I would imagine stemming from that country's much larger size, & studies being done in different states rather than nationally.


A 1985 study by the university of California said that 96% of adult homeless in San Francisco were men, but less in some other cities, working out as an average of 85% nationwide (Richard H. Ropers, “The Rise of the New Urban Homeless,” Public Affairs Report (Berkeley: University of California/Berkeley, Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985), October-December, 1985, Vol. 26, Nos. 5 & 6, p. 4, Table 1 “Comparisons of Homeless Samples from Select Cities.”)

Another source: “Data collected for the 2004 U.S. Conference of Mayors survey showed that in almost all cities surveyed, single males greatly outnumbered single females among the homeless. Single males were most overrepresented in Nashville, Tennessee (79% of the homeless), followed closely by Santa Monica, California (72%), Miami, Florida (70%), and San Francisco, California (69%)” (source: Libraryindex.com). This is a very high percentage but lower than 90%. However, this study refers only to single males: if males in other groups (married men & children) also outnumber women then the total figure of male homelessness would be noticably higher.

A commonly stated figure which pops up repeatedly when googling about this is 68%. Still, obviously, a great inequality, but that number originates with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development & refers to the number of homeless ‘clients’ - i.e the percentage currently being worked with & sheltered by that organization.

There are other factors which make it hard to get a definitive answer: a father with children, or even wife & children, often comes under the heading of ‘families’ - which tends to be classed seperately - so it muddies the water even further. Wikipedia says there are 41% single males to 14% single females. It also says “In 2008 in one sample, women represented 26% of the respondents surveyed” [my italics], which obviously only relates to whoever filled the survey in but still, would presumably mean that 74% of those were male.

My point in listing these differing reports is simply to say we can't know for sure what exact percentage of the world's homeless population is male. There is no single statistic: there will be considerable variation between different countries & even areas within those countries. And it's a big world, but I haven't been able to find any figure anywhere that says men are less than two-thirds of the homeless, & the generally accepted government & charity organization estimates, as I stated at the beginning, do seem to be generally in the region of 80 - 90%.

In my own personal experience (& most likely yours too) living in different cities in England the last 20 years or more, easily 9 out of 10 people I see out on the streets are men. In fact I can’t remember the last time I saw a female beggar, though I always see at least five or six men panhandling every time I cycle into town.

So there we go: doesn't that feel better? To actually know what you're talking about?

It's a good feeling. I recommend it.

The Troubling Misandry of Buffy The Vampire Slayer

So here's the thing: Buffy The Vampire Slayer is possibly my favourite TV show ever, equalled only perhaps by The Sopranos for its grand scope & depth, its balance of humour & pathos. Always surprising, always inspiring, always human & humane - "talking about monsters to talk about people" is how its creator, Joss Whedon once described it.

Joss Whedon is the Charlie Kaufman of television - the most brilliant single mind of that particular medium. And he does what he does there better than anyone else has ever done, I would say.

So what's the problem? Well, the problem is that Buffy is a show that even its creator describes as having an overtly feminist agenda, & in fact that is true, it does. And feminism is a hate movement. Which inevitably leads to misandry - a contemptuous disregard for men's suffering & humanity. So you see my problem.

Paul Nathanson & Katherine K. Young define a misandric film or TV show as one in which the men are all depicted as being either evil (Spike, Angelus, Oz-when-werewolf, Warren, The Master, all the bad guys) or inadequate (Xander, Riley, Oz-when-human, Giles - how many times does Giles get knocked over the head, by the way?).

There are no 'empowered' men in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The only male characters that are strong & self-possessed are monsters & demons, & so, by definition, evil. Angel, the wettest & most self-flagellating beta-male in all sci-fi & fantasy, only comes alive once his soul is returned to him & he becomes the murderous Angelus. But of course then he is, again, Evil. The message being, to be a strong man makes you the bad guy. Oz & Angel & later Spike have to struggle constantly to remain 'good', to behave themselves for fear that their innate, true 'evil' [male] self will escape. A man is defined as good only to the extent that he helps & facilitates the needs of a woman, in this case Buffy, the entitled centre of this world, that all of the other characters flutter around like butterflies.

There is also a third category, of 'honorary women', granted to a very small number of men, usually black, or gay, who are given a little more leeway because they're seen to be from another 'victim' class, & so similarly oppressed by The Patriarchy. True to form & by the book, the only human male in the entire seven year run of the show who is shown to be physically strong, confident, self-possessed yet good is the black principal Robin Wood, who appears in the final season.

The women, on the other hand, are all basically good-to-go: they start from a position of presumed innocence, & are not required to work on themselves or accomplish anything to earn our (the audiences) concern & empathy. If in the unlikely event that they do do something 'bad' (Faith murdering people, Willow trying to end the world) there's always an understandable reason why, & we want them to be given a second chance, we want them to be looked after, & helped. Even the 'bad gurls' like Drusilla & Darla are given terrible backstories of victimhood (at the hands of men, of course) that led to their evilosity. No woman, it seems, is simply born bad. That's something that can only befall a man.

Warren, a human male we are told is a hater of women, is presented to us as an irredeemable monster. Anya, a female demon who has tortured & murdered men for a thousand years, is shown as light relief. As always in the feminist narrative, male violence against women = Horror. Female violence against men = comedy.

Buffy & Faith & all the other slayers have their superpowers, Willow (the most powerful witch in the world, let us not forget) & Tara have their magic. What do the men have? Even such lightweight characters such as Cordelia or Dawn are shown to be as good at fighting as the male 'scoobies', though this bears no resemblance to the reality of any known human society.

So, for instance, the 7-stone stick insect that is Sarah Michelle Gellar routinely beats to a pulp burly men literally twice the size & weight of her, laws of physics be damned. And without ever picking up even a scratch on that perfect face.Yes I know that it's a metaphor for grrrl power & taking back the night & blah diddy blah blah, but what kind of message is that sending to young girls? That if you pick a fight with someone twice your size you're not going to get hurt? That you should pick a fight with someone twice your size?

One of the scariest things about telling girls it's okay - 'empowering', even - to hit boys is that in our society, girls greatest defence against boys is that Boys Don't Hit Girls. And that's a good thing, because boys can hit a lot harder than girls. But the more that girls get told it's ok for them to hit boys, the more that girls are taught to behave like boys, the less likely that golden rule is to hold. If boys get punched in the face by increasingly aggressive females enough times, eventually those boys will hit back. And that's not good, a genie that would be hard to get back in the bottle.

Whedon has carried these ideas of The Überwoman over into his other shows, such as Firefly (Zoe), & Dollhouse (Echo) - human women who can kickbox all comers in high heels & leap a tall man in a single bound. Mortal women as physically strong as any man.



These women don't exist, nor will they ever - not as long as they are women, not without a ton of steroids or genetic modification. It's wishful thinking, & a very strange kind of wishful thinking: the idea that you can or should want to change the laws of nature to fit in with the perceived reality of a presently fashionable ideological movement.

Men the world over are bigger, stronger & faster than women, more heroic & self-sacrificing in an emergency. Every society encourages the sacrifice of the men on behalf of the women, & always has.

If you were to examine all Olympic times for men & women since records were first kept, you would see there is a reason why men & women are not made to compete against each other: if they did, no woman would ever win anything. The times of the guys who come in fourth or fifth will still trump whoever gets the gold in the women's events. Men can jump higher, run faster, throw further.
 

These are innate & immutable physical realities. Men are stronger than women. That's simply how we're built, & any healthy society would see that as a good thing. A strong man should be a good thing to find. If you were trapped in a burning building with a broken leg would you rather have Sarah Michelle Gellar (who plays Buffy) or Nicholas Brendon (who plays Xander) try carry you down a three storey ladder?


In addition to this insistence on the physical supremacy of women, the smartest, most technically minded characters in the Whedon-universe are female too (Willow in Buffy, 'Fred in Angel, Kaylee in Firefly, Claire Saunders & Bennett Halverson in Dollhouse). Again, this bears no relation to the world as it is: women as a group have very little interest in higher mathematics or engineering, as reflected in the percentage of course enrollments at universities.

At Harvard University, there is a class widely held to be the hardest undergraduate maths class in the country: 'Math 55'. Every year around 50 students enrol & more than half of those drop out within the first 5 days, it's that hard. After a couple more weeks the class settles down for what it will be for the rest of the semester: 45% Jewish, 18% Asian, & 100% male.

Now, there is nothing stopping any woman from signing up for that class, & with the present education gap, more women are leaving higher education with degrees than men by a large margin, so either women are choosing not to do higher mathematics, or are trying & can't. Either way, the portrayal across the board of the greatest mathematical or engineering minds being female is (again) a case of wishful thinking on the part of an ideological position that bears no resemblance to the real world young women have to go out & make their way in. As with the depictions of female violence, I don't see how this helps anyone.

The times we live in are the water we swim through: we can't see them, & even the best minds bend to them & obey, at least some of the time. The nineties was a feminist age - Whedon probably believed when he made Buffy that rape was a major epidemic; that 1 in 4 women were being dragged into bushes & raped daily; that domestic violence was a crime that only men inflicted & only women were the victims of; that women were getting paid 70¢ for every dollar a man made working the same job & so on & so on. He was wrong but he meant well, & was just trying to do the best he could with the information he was provided with, so it's hard to think bad of him. And for all I've said here he made a great show.

Aww, maybe I just think too much. Breaking Bad is nice, too.

Shaven Pussies Make Me Sad

 'Jesus Hates Bald Pussy' 
- Hunter S. Thompson

I started writing this as a response to a recent Hooking-Up Smart post where the talk turned to the current preference amongst college-age boys for the shaven punani.

It's kind of interesting looking at the 100 or so years of nude photography & also the developments in pornography & seeing how sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s the female body, which had been worshipped in its natural state as the wonder that it is for a hundred thousand years or more was for the very first time suddenly judged as wanting. Plastic, artificial bodies - silicone & botox & genitals scraped free of hair became seemingly commonplace pretty much overnight. Compare any Playboy pic from before 1984 to one from 1994, & then again to one from 2004 & beyond & you can see the whole sorry downward slide played out in pictures. The sad thing is that a whole generation has grown up with that being the norm, & of course it's hard for any of us to see outside our societal conditioning (cf. Feminism, for example, just to try keep this site on topic).

Shaving for women did not become popular until 1915 when the May edition of Harper's Bazaar was published with an ad showing a model in a sleeveless summer dress and bare armpits. This was supplemented by the Wilkinson Sword Company, who ran an ad campaign in 1920, whose purpose was to convince the public that feminine body hair was both unladylike and unhygienic. This ad campaign was successful and in two years the sales of razors doubled. Now, this way of thinking has become so engrained in our society, through generations of daughters following their mothers, that most women never question the fact that they shave themselves. - A History Of Shaving

A shaven pussy always seems a little sad, to me, like a laboratory animal, all interfered with & wrong, somehow. It's like when you see a beautiful wild moor ripped up & turned into a golf course for visiting Japanese businessmen. These are symptoms that have accompanied the growth of capitalism, consumerism & the advertising industry. Fear is the best way to make people buy stuff they don't need, so making people question & distrust their own bodies is a great way to make people spend money on waxing strips & deodorant, ladyshaves & aftershave, pancake makeup & anal bleach. The message being: Your Body Is Wrong Unless You Fix It (With Our Product).

The natural world is being made to seem unacceptable & natural processes are increasingly obscured by the artificial things we create. We are divorced from what our food is, how it is grown & where it comes from, we don't see what happens to the plastic shit we throw away, don't see it being buried in the ground in landfill sites, the battery acid seeping into the rivers. Our human relationships are carried out through glowing rectangular screens, & even our own bodies are becoming foreign to us. It's batshit crazy & thankfully a blip in human history which cannot last, but try telling that to a 19 year old. Does it even matter to them it never used to be this way?

We've had a little excitement at the Bal Nègre and Joe's mind has slipped back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt. It's at this hour, when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness mounts to a fever pitch. He thinks of the women he passed up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might have had for the asking, if it weren't that he was fed up with them. He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt.. What gripes him most about her is that she doesn't put on any flesh. "It's like taking a skeleton to bed with you", he says. "The other night I took her on--out of pity--and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean ... not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It's repulsive ain't it? And it's funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn't look like a twat anymore: it's like a dead clam or something." He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight. "I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it. You should have seen me ... it was comical. I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her. I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously. You'd imagine I'd never seen one before. And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there's nothing to it after all, especially when it's shaved. It's the hair that makes it mysterious. That's why a statue leaves you cold."

- Henry Miller, Tropic Of Cancer 1934

Origins Of The Term "Politically Correct"

Yesterday over at Hooking-Up Smart I heard a feminist commentee refer to someone as "forward thinking & politically correct", which startled me a little & made me think that a few words about how this term originated & came into modern usage might not be a bad thing.

The words 'politically' & 'correct' had, of course, been used together before the last century - the earliest example given in Wikipedia is 1793 - but always in their literal sense, to highlight a logical fallacy about a political statement, not as a criticism of thinking outside of the state's current position on a given matter, or of use of language that others may find upsetting: "The term previously used 'correctness' in its literal sense and without any particular reference to language that might be considered offensive or discriminatory."

Ruth Perry, in her "A Short History of the term 'Politically Correct'" (1992) traces the now accepted use of the term back to the 1960's & Chairman Mao's Little Red Book: "It probably came into the New Left vocabulary through translations of Mao Tse-tung's writing". Others agree with when & through which channels it entered western culture but place the origin of the phrase with Trotsky. I found a good synopsis of its use since then at the website The Karl Hess Club which I will reproduce here in full:

"PC" has gone through four stages of meaning. "Politically correct" was initially coined by Leon Trotsky to refer favorably to those whose views remained in sync with the ever-shifting Bolshevik Party line. This was important, as "not PC" people risked prison or death.
"Politically correct" was revived (and again, used favorably) by 1960s New Left radicals who fancied themselves revolutionaries in the mold of Che, Castro, and Mao. "Politically correct" was first used negatively by 1980s conservatives, following the publication of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Conservatives embraced the term "politically incorrect" as a badge of honor to contrast their championing of free speech against campus leftists who used speech codes to suppress debate on sensitive topics. This was also when the term first became widely known by its acronym, "PC." In these three previous stages, everyone agreed that PC meant Left, and "not PC" meant Right. But because liberals don't like a reputation of being anti-free speech, within a few years they did a turnabout, and called their opponents "PC" and themselves "not PC." Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect is representative of this fourth stage, creating the odd result of a self-proclaimed "not PC" show winning a very PC environmental media award.
However, despite liberals' turnabout, conservatives continued to refer to themselves too as "not PC." Thus "PC" has lost any specific meaning in this fourth stage, since everyone defines their position as the now chic "not PC," and their opponents as "PC." (A far cry from the days when Russians dreaded the Chekists who executed "not PC" people.)

What Political Correctness really means - wherever & in whatever form it appears - is this: that The State or similar authority (the Church, society, any dominant ideology, it doesn't matter which) has decided what you can or cannot think or say. It has decided this for you. Its definition is the one you must accept. Your opinion is wrong. Your opinion should not be heard. Your opinion is Incorrect.

Live From The Witch Trials

There's a meme that's been present in our culture for a good 40 years or more, & it's this: the idea that the 'witchburning' craze of the 15th-18th centuries was in some way simply a war upon women. That it was in fact a "genocide" (or "gendercide") carried out upon women, a "woman's holocaust", with some of the more fanciful claims of the death toll being as high as 9 million. Dan Brown, in his extraordinarily popular blockbuster novel The DaVinci Code makes the claim that "the church burned at the stake an astonishing five million women."

That figure really is astonishing. It's also almost certainly false.

A couple of days ago I was engaged in one of the many fantastically in-depth discussions about ideas & philosophy & the general human tragedy with my wondrous lover F, & I don't know how but somehow we got onto the witchburnings, & I realized that I really ought to know a little more about the claims being made & what is actually known historically about those times.

So then, first stop, as always, was Wikipedia, whose entry on 'witch-hunt' gave these basic figures for the years 1450-1750:

Region	Number of trials	Number of executions
British Isles and North America	~5,000	~1,500–2,000
Empire (Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Lorraine, Austria and Czech)	~50000	~25000–30000
France	~3,000	~1,000
Scandinavia	~5,000	~1,700–2,000
Eastern Europe (Poland and Lithuania, Hungary and Russia)	~7,000	~2,000
Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy)	~10,000	fewer than 1,000
Total:	~80,000	~35,000

The first thing that strikes me immediately about this is that, in the whole of the British Isles & North America combined, over a period of three hundred years, there were in total less than two thousand deaths. That works out around 6 or 7 people a year, & a quarter of those, as you probably already know, were men. An unpleasant business, yes, but hardly a holocaust. To put that in some perspective, more people died in road accidents last year in Britain alone than in all 300 years of witch-burnings.

A note to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry tells us:

 The most common estimates [worldwide] are between 40,000 and 60,000 deaths. Brian Levack (The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe) multiplied the number of known European witch trials by the average rate of conviction and execution, to arrive at a figure of around 60,000 deaths. Anne Lewelyn Barstow (Witchcraze) adjusted Levack's estimate to account for lost records, estimating 100,000 deaths. Ronald Hutton (Triumph of the Moon) argues that Levack's estimate had already been adjusted for these, and revises the figure to approximately 40,000.

While looking for occurences of the '9 million' figure, [which seems to have entered the public at large's conciousness via a documentary film from 1990 called The Burning Times] I came across an interesting site called 'Gendercide.org' which at first glance I took to be simply more feminist propaganda (the words 'gender' & 'patriarchy', which I usually take as flashing neon warning signs, crop up frequently) but on further reading appeared to hold a much more balanced position, & included these further reports on how many people died:

"The most dramatic [recent] changes in our vision of the Great Hunt [have] centered on the death toll," notes Jenny Gibbons. She points out that estimates made prior to the mid-1970s, when detailed research into trial records began, "were almost 100% pure speculation." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.) "On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements," writes Robin Briggs, "a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe; gendercide rather than genocide. [See, e.g., the witch-hunt documentary "The Burning Times".] This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men." Briggs adds that "these figures are chilling enough, but they have to be set in the context of what was probably the harshest period of capital punishments in European history." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, p. 8.)

Brian Levack's book The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe arrives at roughly similar conclusions. Levack "surveyed regional studies and found that there were approximately 110,000 witch trials. Levack focused on recorded trials, not executions, because in many cases we have evidence that a trial occurred but no indication of its outcomes. On average, 48% of trials ended in an execution, [and] therefore he estimated 60,000 witches died. This is slightly higher than 48% to reflect the fact that Germany, the center of the persecution, killed more than 48% of its witches." (Gibbons, Recent Developments.)

Strangely, even though Gendercide admits that 'over 99.9-plus percent of all women who lived during the three centuries of the witch craze were not harmed', & also that in a number of places (such as France, Iceland & Finland) as many or more men than women were accused & sentenced (in France more than half, Finland almost half, in Iceland it was 90% male) it still feels justified in labelling the witch-hunts 'gendercide', which seems to run contrary to the evidence it lists. An interesting site, though - hard to pigeonhole (it covers the enforced military conscription of males alongside female infanticide, for instance). I recommend giving it a look.
 
A couple more fascinating tidbits from it: the first debunking the widely held notion that the attack on 'witches' was an attack on midwives, thought to be the torch-bearers for the old, 'pre-patriarchal' ways:

One theory, popularized by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in their 1973 pamphlet Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, proposed that midwives were especially likely to be targeted in the witch-hunts. This assertion has been decisively refuted by subsequent research, which has established the opposite: that "being a licensed midwife actually decreased a woman's chances of being charged" and "midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters" than being victimized by them. (Gibbons, Recent Developments; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History.)

And second, that it was an entirely male hatred & distrust of the female that the innocent accused women struggled under:

"women did testify in large numbers against other women, making up 43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30 per cent of them. ... A more sophisticated count for the English Home Circuit by Clive Holmes shows that the proportion of women witnesses rose from around 38 per cent in the last years of Queen Elizabeth to 53 per cent after the Restoration." (Briggs, Witches & Neighbours, pp. 264-65, 270, 273, 282.)

Deborah Willis's study of "Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England" similarly finds it "clear ... that women were actively involved in making witchcraft accusations against their female neighbours"

[Alan] Macfarlane finds that as many women as men informed against witches in the 291 Essex cases he studied; about 55 percent of those who believed they had been bewitched were female. The number of witchcraft quarrels that began between women may actually have been higher; in some cases, it appears that the husband as "head of household" came forward to make statements on behalf of his wife, although the central quarrel had taken place between her and another woman. ... It may, then, be misleading to equate "informants" with "accusers": the person who gave a statement to authorities was not necessarily the person directly quarreling with the witch. Other studies support a figure in the range of 60 percent. In Peter Rushton's examination of slander cases in the Durham church courts, women took action against other women who had labeled them witches in 61 percent of the cases. ... J.A. Sharpe also notes the prevalence of women as accusers in seventeenth-century Yorkshire cases, concluding that "on a village level witchcraft seems to have been something peculiarly enmeshed in women's quarrels." To a considerable extent, then, village-level witch-hunting was women's work. (Willis, Malevolent Nurture, pp. 35-36.)

So where did that "9 million" figure come from, & why? Why is that estimate so far out? It's no coincidence that both that number & also the term "holocaust" have come to be used: when we hear that word & think of millions dead we think specifically of the Jewish holocaust of the second world war, in which somewhere in the region of 6 million died.

"What should trouble everyone," write Nathanson & Young, about the aforementioned Burning Times documentary,"is the fact that this film tries to upstage the Jewish tragedy for political purposes, to exploit the suffering of Jews in order to score political points for the suffering of women. Burning claims not merely that women have suffered just as Jews have suffered, but that women have suffered more than Jews and even that female suffering is the paradigm of all suffering." 

The very real horrors of the witch-trials have been inflated & exploited by feminism for political ends, to score higher victim points, to claim greater victim status, which in feminism thinking tends to mean you have won the argument: Who Suffers Loudest Wins.

A final word on this from Sanctifying Misandry, by Paul Nathanson & Katherine K. Young: 

'Even if we could study history exclusively in terms of gender, even if we could reduce history effectively to the story of relations between men and women, misogyny would still be an inadequate explanation. The Burning Times acknowledges several possible causes of the witch hunts, to be sure, but it takes only misogyny seriously. Literary evidence notwithstanding, it is by no means self-evident that all or even most men have ever hated women. What does seem self-evident is that most or even all men have been ambivalent about women. The fact is that, at one time or another - paradoxically, often at the same time - men feel both anger and love for women, both fear and respect, both envy and admiration. Moreover, the same is true in reverse. Most or all women have been ambivalent about men. The same is true of the way all people feel about their parents, children, relatives, friends, and communities. Ambivalence is a universal feature of the human condition, largely because ambiguity is a universal feature of reality itself (or, at least, of the ways in which finite beings perceive the world). The witch hunts surely do represent a period when misogyny took hold. At issue for historians of the witch craze, however, is not why misogyny exists but why it swept away all other attitudes toward women - who included wives, sisters, daughters, even mothers - at a particular time and place. That is a task for historians, not for political activists masquerading as scholars.'

Thoughts on Lady Chatterley

I recently read, for the first time, all of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover . A marvellous book: rich, deep, & long-resonating, containing great truths & insights into maleness & masculinity, & yet reads like a woman's romance novel. To bridge that gap, to write so well for both sexes is rare indeed, & I can't help but think that, even with all the advantages & developments that writers have had at their disposal since then, still no-one has written better about men & women than this. And perhaps, in this present age, no-one would be allowed to.

The book was was written in 1928, while Lawrence was ill with tuberculosis, & was his last full-length novel. Two years later he would be dead. After finishing it he wrote an afterword - 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' - discussing his thoughts behind its creation, & upon the state of man & woman generally. I am shaken by how prophetic his vision of the future - our future - has been. In particular, the replacing of the family, the tribe, the trade union, & the bond between the man & the woman - which all others emanate from - with the State.

The point he makes is that all states - capitalist or communist - have pushed for the weakening of the family unit, & of the power of the individual. Such is their nature. And Feminism has been state policy all over the western world for at least 40 years - most likely more - & an argument could be made that in fact it has been state policy since the beginnings of the 20th century, with the rise of industrialized labour, & the wartime work of women in WWII being a test run for what was to come: the forcible full-time employment of the one half of humanity which had always previously been exempt from wage-slavery, all under the banner of liberation. That Lawrence saw this, so clearly, within 10 years of the Russian revolution, takes my breath away.

As I said before, I can't help but think that, for all the 'freedoms' we now apparently enjoy, the sexual liberation & freedom of expression we are told we possess (in no small part due to censorship battles like 'the Lady Chatterley trial' of the 1960s), still no-one has written better of, or more deeply about, the eternal mystery of man & woman since then. Lawrence speaks of sex with awe & reverence, & when he does he is speaking of the whole, instead of the parts, of the terrible magnetic compulsion of our unity, instead of the petty grievances & greedy recriminations of our separation. We simply don't see ourselves in that way anymore. But perhaps one day we will again.

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  Extracts from A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928

Everybody, pretty well, takes it for granted that as soon as we can find a possible way out of it, marriage will be abolished. The Soviet abolishes marriage: or did. If new “modern” states spring up, they will almost certainly follow suit. They will try to find some social substitute for marriage, and abolish the hated yoke of conjugality. State support of motherhood, State support of children, and independence of women. It is on the programme of every great scheme of reform. And it means, of course, the abolition of marriage.

Do we, then, want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State. Do we want to fall under the direct sway of the State? Any State? For my part, I don’t.

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The sense of isolation,  followed by the sense of menace and of fear, is bound to arise as the feeling of oneness and community with our fellow men declines, and the feeling of individualism and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases. The so-called “cultured” classes are the first to develop “personality” and individualism, and the first to fall into this state of unconscious menace and fear. The working classes retain the old blood-warmth of oneness and togetherness some decades longer. Then they lose it too. And then class-consciousness becomes rampant, and class-hate. Class-hate and class-consciousness are only a sign that the old togetherness, the old blood warmth has collapsed, and every man is really aware of himself in apartness. Then we have these hostile groupings of men for the sake of opposition, strife. Civil strife becomes a necessary condition of self-assertion.

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The blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled. Even scientifically we know it. But therefore they are the two rivers that encircle the whole of life, and in marriage the circle is complete, and in sex the two rivers touch and renew one another, without ever commingling or confusing. We know it. The phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depths the great river of female blood—yet neither breaks its bounds.

Two rivers of blood, are man and wife, two distinct eternal streams, that have the power of touching and communing and so renewing, making new one another, without any breaking of the subtle confines, any confusing or commingling. And the phallus is the connecting link between the two rivers, that establishes the two streams in a oneness, and gives out of their duality a single circuit, forever. And this, this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity. And all we know of the will of God is that He wishes this, this oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime, this oneness within the great dual blood-stream of humanity.

Man dies, and woman dies, and perhaps separate the souls go back to the creator. Who knows? But we know that the oneness of the blood-stream of man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars.

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Father's Day

There's a meme going round on Facebook at the moment of posting your father or grandfather's picture as your profile photo until after Father's Day. Actually, 'any patriarchal figure will do' is what my friend said when she told me. It strikes me as a beautiful thing to honor, & maybe there's still time to spread the same meme over the blogosphere.

So here's my contribution, my Grandad on my mother's side. My mother wouldn't be here without him. I wouldn't be here without him. And I have his eyes: