Warren Farrell by Dragort

I’ve run into masses of annoying things lately (not annoying for most mind you, just annoying for the feminist minded).

Like why is it that almost every where I go females are an afterthought – I mean if they’re a thought at all, but walk into an artstore and pick up a book on nudes and suddenly males don’t exist? I mean I get four-hundred nude girls, to maybe one guy (if I’m lucky). It’s like suddenly we exist but, oh yeah, we’re naked. But that one doesn’t even matter. That one’s like a whatever in the scheme of annoying things.

The one that really takes the cake is the Ph.D. professor, Warren Farrell’s claims that men having power is a myth, in his book ingeniusly titled The Myth of Male Power. I didn’t have the $25 to buy it so I just wandered around the book store with it for a good 45 minutes, trying to read all the relevant bits without looking like I was so much. I fully intend to buy and read the book at some stage, preferably second-hand so that I don’t actually contribute to this guy’s wealth, or ego. From what I gathered the book starts out with the author saying how he used to lecture at women’s rights events, how women loved him/ his speeches, how he learnt to say what they “wanted to hear” (obviously all women like to hear lies, they don’t have the capacity for the truth). He goes on to let us know that he admires the Women’s movement, he realises that it has done remarkable things (stating here things that have only helped the betterment of both sexes, or of children, not of women alone) and then adds that he hopes that no one uses the book to undermine the Women’s movement he so admires (i.e. the one that betters both sexes).

And from there it seems to get worse. Farrell’s arguments seems to be based on the fact that men go to war, breast cancer gets more funding than prostate cancer and men kill themselves more than women. Jesus fucking Christ, where was little Warren Farrell standing when God handed out the brains? Ok, men go to war, not women (even if this was strictly true, which I’m telling you, it’s not) how is that an excuse to men’s powerlessness? Do women not get killed in war? Do they not get raped? Are they the ones that make the decision to start a war? Are they the ones who make the decision to end the war? Where is their power in the fact that men go to war?

Men kill themselves more than women, hmm, no surprise there. Women have far too many responsibilities to be given the luxury of killing themselves. My mum was suicidal two weeks ago but as she has four kids at home and three kids out, it wasn’t even an option. Men on the other hand, they walk out on their wives, they walk out on their kids, why shouldn’t they walk out on life? I’m not even being nasty here. You can take a responsibility or you can shirk it. Men shirk, and shirk and shirk, and shirk, and soon enough they’re alone with nothing to live for. I mean at one stage they were allowed to do that because women were prepared to take them on as a responsibility too. Women aren’t so willing now (they’re willing to put up with shitloads of crap but there’s a line now, mostly (ok, sometimes)). So, women have adapted and men are dying because they haven’t. Whatever, sort yourselves out, boys, we did/ are/ were.

And then there’s silly little Warren Farrell (who was standing behind the door when God handed out the brains) who goes on to say women (especially feminists) are afraid of admitting that men have no power because then they won’t have the right to claim “victim power” or “entitlement power”. I don’t really know what entitlement power is, so I’ll leave that one for smarter people. But victim power, yeah, I’ve got that one down pat. That’s the one where you FORCE your powerless male friend/ brother/ partner to walk to the shops to buy you chocolate, refusing to go yourself on the pretext of “I’m a girl, I could get raped”. Yeah, I like the power that comes with that. There’s a chance though, you know just a chance, that I’d give ALL that power up if I could just…well, say, walk the streets after dark without fear of rape. Be able to sit in my own home during the day and not have the doors all firmly locked. Be able to sit in a library by myself, studying for my archeology assignment, without having a guy sit beside me, masturbating. Be able to have a bed upon which my friend (female) had not been raped violently by a man with a knife. A bed that until recently had borne the blood stains of said friend even though she co-operated. Yes, we like our victim power, Warry. But how about this? Stop raping us, stop hitting us, give us jobs equal to yours and we’ll give up our victim power. Better still, let us rape YOU, let us hit YOU, let us give YOU jobs equal to ours and we’ll give YOU our victim power! Yes! We’ll give you ALL of it!! ALL of it!!

by Dragort

Postmodernism by Demonista

I recently read a post about decontructionism…and oy-vay. Postmodernism’s uber-academic language makes me feel stupid. I need to use a dictionary for words that have no practical usage, like poststructuralists, psychodynamic, “the performative nature of the self,” “normalizing regimes deploy power,” “embrace the subversive potential of unorthodox performances and parodic identities.”

“The self is merely an unstable discursive node – a shifting confluence of multiple discursive currents – and sexed/gendered identity is merely a ‘corporeal style'” “What the fuck?!?” is what I say to that. I recommend reading some rad fem work, such as Dworkin’s 1975 speech “The Root Cause,” in which she explains that while gender is socially constructed to benefit men, keep men superior, and keep men and woman opposite and apart, even in “intimate” relationships, it is real because it has real enforcers giving real consequences to real people. It’s real because we believe it to be true. It’s fictive, but not fictional.

I think that postmodernists/postconstructuralists do it purposely, that they only want to deal with their elite little clubs of those who have eight or so years of post-secondary education in intellectual abstraction. Although they say everything is socially constructed, they say it’s constructed by these formless, disembodied ideas. There’s no: Who’s coming up with these ideas? Whose interests do they serve? Who is disadvantaged? Why is one group taught this and another taught the opposite? In their work, they rarely use women as sources, except Judith Butler. The rest are male – from Socrates to Marx to Freud to Derrida to Foucault to Hobbes to Thomas More to Rousseau to Jefferson to Locke to Nietzsche to Patrick Califia (because he’s too manly to be Pat now)…

Practically none deal specifically with women, other than to say, like Nietzsche, that if women are unhappy, popping out babies will solve their problems and that social organization needs to be in the form of master-slave. Or like Freud: women are narcissistic masochists who resolve their penis envy by switching the clitoris for the vagina as their orgasmic organ and replacing their wish for their father’s penis with the maternal need for a penised baby. See, that way they’ll have a dick in them, good and proper, for at least nine months. Or like Califia: if a woman is aroused at sexual abuse, she wanted it all along and a master shaving his slave’s vulva ensures that the woman remains his little girl and property. Or like most of the rest, simply ignore women – don’t even include them in your theories – call for the “brotherhood of man” and say every man has a right to property: land, money, slaves, children, women – a man’s home is his domain, after all – say all men are created equal, then word it such that women and slaves remain chattel. To be fair, Marx did deal, sort of, with women, only to say that their economic class trumped their sex class and that women who raised children, cleaned house, fed, supported, and were accommodating holes for their husbands contributed nothing to the labour force, and therefore, would need to work outside the home, too.

In my philosophy class we dealt with one woman philosopher, Hannah Arendt, and one feminist male, John Stuart Mill. None of the lessons or readings we had on them included feminist philosophy, discussions on women’s legal rights, women’s contribution to knowledge, etc. Needless to say, neither did any of the men we read. Also needless to say, none dared call it sexism.

You’d think that first wave feminism, radical feminism, etc. never existed except as a quaint little tea party for idle idiots or a mob dedicated to torturing men with burning bras and rusty pink razors. Meanwhile, the pomos who feign feminism think that because they’re so advanced and educated and have read Lacan and Foucault they are above the “simple people”, seen in, for example, their parodying of gender. This simply means they exaggerate, usually, femininity more than the average person such as drag queens, Madonna in the nineties, women wearing corsets, stiletto heels, shaving their pubic/leg/armpit hair, plastic surgery, daddy-daughter rape/prostitution scenarios, etc. Under poststructuralism all these are fine choices, politically correct if you will, because feminism is only about consumerism-defined choice and besides…they’ve read Derrida and Freud, dammit, so they can “parody” oppression by imitating it.

So, it could be supposed that if gender can be parodied and become feminist, than so can using virtually all male sources for one’s philosophical theories.

Now, where’s the normalizing regime to deploy power so I can look away from it and write a book about it? Why stop jerking off to porn when I could read Butler and find the parodic performance of what seems to be, to the uneducated, silly, anti-male eye, sexual oppression? To hell with battered women’s shelters and treatment centres for women in prostitution, where’s John Locke’s Second Treatise and Nina Hartley’s Guide to Double Penetration?

by Demonista

Not a Man, Not a Man’s Woman by jakalene extreme

by jakalene extreme

Lot’s Wife by allecto

Lost in salt and sand. An exhumation. Lot’s wife was really a pillar.

I will not go silently. This you have already learnt. I relinquish to no one. When you told me your stories to shape me, they unmade me. They merely taught me how to remake myself. In the most powerful way. Through stories.

You thought that you had the power. That your power was exhaustive. You had the power to name. You had the power to tell. You had the ultimate power of story. And the one true story.

But see, I have taken your power. And I can wield it for myself. This is me. In these words. These words that you shaped, to shape me. You made them a weapon. I can make them peace. And piece. For all the pieces that you chopped me into.

With your stories.

I think I can hate you without anger. I think I can love you without fear. I think I can do both.

I think I can put you back together too. If you listen. If you let me heal you with my stories. The ones that can put the pieces back.

Sometimes I wish that you could hear me. This is my voice, this is my voice. I am not shouting. I am just telling.

This is what your stories did to me.

Can you look at yourself?

Your voice is louder than mine. Your voice has more power. Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in your words. Drowning in your droning voice. I suppose I am. My own voice sings continually to save myself.

When I stop my weaving you will know that I am gone. And you have buried me. With your words.

Silence can be my death. And I have died before.

I am not sure how long I will keep telling. With my weaker voice. In my insignificant words. This is the ground that I have chosen.

You are the opponent that tells better stories.

Lot’s wife didn’t have a voice. Nor did she have a name. Shall I give her one?

This is my story after all. Here in the confines of this page. She was a blank because of you. She was salt in spite of you. But I can make her whole.

Here is a secret. She never wanted to be sugar. And Lot had no taste for salt.

I made promises to you. When I was little; sitting on your knee. And you would start the stories.

If you are a good girl, you would say, if you are a good girl. And I would make promises and swear. That I would love you forever and forever.

But at some point I turned into a pillar of salt. What was it that I was looking back at?

I can lick my skin now and I like the taste of myself.

I did not keep my promises. And you did not keep yours.

Is this a letter that I am writing to you, father? Or is it a story? One of my many pieces. The slow beginning of peace.

These are not the stories that you want to hear. Did you think I had a choice when you sat me on your knee and consumed me with your stories?

I once was your princess, coated in sugar and I turned into a pillar of salt. It was evening. I ran away from your city.

She says that she can hear you still. I’ve shut you out. But look. Is this a letter or a story?

I can’t tell the difference anymore. You still have me. Your stories still hold me. I want out.

I will keep telling.

I realise there is a dissonance that runs through all of my words.

I write because I hate you. Is that the only reason?

You thought your stories could tie me down. I make-believe that I’ve reclaimed myself. And I pretend. Because we both know me.

At least you thought you knew me. At least I thought I knew myself.

Maybe all I know is the limits of my cage. Maybe I cut you free and cut myself too.

It isn’t you I hate. It isn’t you I love. It is this cage. Every day I discover more bars that have been disguised as freedom.

A man once said, “the mind is always free.” This is the ultimate of your deceptions. This cage you built for me within my mind is stronger than any cage you could place around my body.

And I’m scratching you out, scratching you out. It is hard to tell where the bars end and the woman begins.

I don’t know if you have noticed that I am still bleeding.

You are quite right. It is rather like madness to want to rip myself to pieces. To invent myself histories I haven’t lived.

But all women are mad. They are mad if they believe your lies and they are even madder if they don’t.

I refuse, thank you. I’ll make up my own lies. Starting with this page, with these words, with this story.

These are my lies. It is up to you whether you believe them.

You told me once that you would build me a castle. Instead you made me into your castle. A place to hide your dreams. A defensible position; or so you believed.

But look. See. I have come into my own. My body is no longer the castle of your dreams. And you think that I have transformed into your nightmare.

I have. I am alive for myself. No longer a castle but merely a pillar… Salt, sand, my exhumation. I am supporting myself.

by allecto

We will not slumber until every woman wakes by allecto

This is dedicated to Heart from Women’s Space because she is a sister. Because she is brave and strong and tireless.

Love and peace to you, Heart. This is for you.

***

The world breaks open. Underneath the layers, transcending the past, making the present.

I have seen it written. In the hour of our forced surrender. The world will diminish as the time draws near.

Aching with the lost and ancient tidings, her beginning has come. Rekindling our magic. Lusty, wild and untamed. Recalling to us a time when freedom was a word that had meaning.

Do we have her power? This one that calls to us. Cries out long forgotten secrets. Screams our true names. Falling silent as the moon wanes. She is the one that tells us of the future.

She comes in before the dawn, when our power awakens from the stealthy sleep of those who can ill afford dreams. When half of our world is drowning beneath the man-made weather, whether, weather. When half our world is starving. Sacred ground as dry as dust.

Speak to me of your power. Speak to me in riddles, in a woman’s tongue. This day is coming into being and I need no translation. I can feel you breathing, sisters. The calm static before this long-awaited storm.

Our storm.

We have been without our rain and thunder for far too long…

I smell the tumult of our revolution, rising from the east…

Come to me then, in fury and in rage and with warmth. I will not let the cold decay of this bleaching rancour. I will not let this mindless, bloody, relentless torment hold me any longer. I am breaching the walls of this prison. My love, my heart, myself within my sisters. My sisters in me.

Even death cannot strip us of our elemental power. We sisters do not fear the earth.

Listen to the seasons. Listen to the earth beneath your feet. Breathe with the beauty of her. Sing it out. Sing our tempest into being. And as the storm of us gathers on the horizon, know this. We will not slumber until every woman wakes.

Let the rains come in with the tide. Beat out a rhythm in women’s time. And let us soar.

by allecto