Just in case you hadn’t heard

…middle class feminists are carrying us. Grovelling is in order so get on your knees and thank them all you low income, welfare-dependent, struggling, poverty class feminist slackers.

Just ask News With Nipples:

Over the last 18 months, feminism has become mainstream – largely thanks to the middle-class feminists who are now being mocked for their efforts because apparently, in the she-pee contest about who is doin’ it right and who is doin’ it wrong, being middle-class means your opinion doesn’t count. Are we really going to use income levels to judge who has a right to speak and who doesn’t?

It’s a while since such a blatant display of class prejudice really nauseated me enough to blog out against it, but this is an election year in which the sitting government have promised to deliver a budget surplus, and poor people, mostly women and children, are already suffering. Check out the comments and article here, for example:

An article published by a Liberal Party-aligned think tank that advocates killing off the poorest 20 per cent of Australians as a way to get the budget back on track has been described as a ”disgraceful rant” by Treasurer Wayne Swan.

A ”modest cull of the enormously poor” has been suggested by right-wing business lobbyist Toby Ralph in a tongue-in-cheek opinion piece written in reaction to the federal government’s attack on the ”fabulously wealthy” through superannuation taxes.

Of course men are going to spout inhumane bile like the above. Men are ignorant and have very little capacity for genuine empathy.

But it’s grossly offensive to hear these rusted-on-to-male-breadwinner, middle class feminists make such broad sweeping statements about their poorer sisters. It’s also absolute bull’s pizzle which would be why there is no evidence cited. And who is it who is supposedly picking on all these middle class feminists who are apparently saving the movement? That wasn’t made clear either. Because it’s a straw argument. Like poor people have the power to silence the rich. What a fucking joke.

If all middle class feminists have to offer is repetitious, subjective reasoning about how “we need to talk about stuff” which is in no way remotely informed by any feminist analysis; empty statements about “including rad fems” (after actively EXcluding us from their spaces with their lesbophobia and hate speech against radfems!); and self-aggrandising lies about single-handedly carrying the movement, long AFTER they’ve been told that we don’t believe in their futile reformist strategies that still haven’t worked after hundreds of years, then they can keep it.

What is a radical feminist?

Academically, we are different from our liberal feminist sisters in many theoretical ways which most readers are already familiar with. But all of these differences seem to come down to one primary difference – truth.

Radical feminists have gotten past their squeamishness about facing the truth of women’s reality in patriarchy. Some of us have even gotten past our squeamishness about speaking the truth, but we all think it and are aware of it. We have faced the reality of our existence in relation to the male of the human species. We no longer believe that men can be reformed, that the male system can be reformed, through political strategising at the systemic level and through careful (and polite!) conversations with men to explain to them what it is they, as individuals and as a class, are doing to us and why what they are doing to us is wrong, why they should stop it. Because radical feminists have faced the truth about the “bad” men and the things they like to routinely do to us with impunity.

Radical feminists have also gone further than this. There must be many liberal feminists who understand the truth about the “bad” men and the things they like to routinely do to us with impunity, just based on the amount of evidence of this, evidence that informs our every breath, step, action, every single day of our lives. Many liberal feminists know this truth, deep down, even if they avoid speaking of it in polite company. But our liberal feminist sisters have not yet been able to face the truth about the other men, the supposed “not bad” men. Because the “not bad” men are still the “bad” men, let’s face it. They are not actively aggressive to us because they don’t have to be. There are enough men who like to abuse, harass, rape and kill us, routinely and with impunity, that the “not bad” men don’t have to. They can just sit tight and benefit from systemic and individual violence against us without lifting a finger. The fact that after centuries of women asking the “not bad” men to help us with the relentless violent intentions of many many “bad” men, the violence and the intent of violence, and it’s not just the constant threat of it, it is widespread intent, is still there informing our every move, is why radical feminists have faced the truth about all men.

Liberal feminists are not yet ready to face the truth of this. Like MRAs, Liberal and Lefty Dudes, Conservatives and garden variety victim-blamers, Liberal Feminists are invested in the myth of the Not Bad Man/ Not All Men. They have not learned how to manage two thoughts simultaneously – that there are men in their life that they as individuals care about, love even, and that those men are still bad men who are ultimately heavily invested in maintaining these levels of violence and who are benefitting from this widespread intent of harm towards us. And they always will be. This truth is soul-destroying, but radical feminists accept it. Because for every individual “bad” man who threatens us, harms us, rapes us or kills us, there is an entire chain of command of other men, “not bad” men who set about normalising the violence of the “bad” man. From law enforcement, to judicial authority, to media, psychologists, male friends and family members – the individual “bad” man has a team of expert supporters backing him up in his violence, obscuring his intent in order to obscure the intent of men as a class. Only after a dead body is found will there be any chance of real consequences for the “bad” man, once his victim is safely silenced forever. But only sometimes. Even though men collectively have an abundance of resources on hand to enforce the rules of patriarchy. At any given time or in any given space, there are teams of workers, armed and equipped to deal with the issues that matter to men, wars over resources, fires that damage land and property, theft and property crimes, even medical emergencies (because men experience those). We have the resources, equipment and the people to implement them, ready around the clock to be deployed at a moments notice, in the name of patriarchy. But none of this is for us, for our safety. A man could be abducting a woman from a suburban train station with the intent of inflicting suffering and/or death on her, and within a one kilometre radius you would find all the resources I just mentioned, just sitting there waiting to be deployed. But never for us. They never benefit us. We really need to consider this. If men with power were serious about VAW politics then hey, they actually do have the resources laying around to forcibly prevent it. Think how much time is spent just sitting around waiting for the fires to occur? How many people, armed and equipped just sitting around for their whole shift because of the possibility of being needed? When women and children are being raped and beaten in their homes or on the streets, there are hoards and hoards of well-paid workers nearby, doing their paperwork, playing table tennis, sleeping – doing nothing about the violence because they are waiting for the emergencies that matter. Consider this…we.do.not.matter- literally.

For the most part, it’s safe for men to do the things they do to us, routinely and with impunity, and it’s also safe for them to say that they like doing those things to us, or that they like thinking about doing those things to us, or that they like to hear of other men doing those things to us. It is absolutely safe for men to rejoice in the knowledge of violent acts done to us, laugh about it. We are stuck in an impossible maze here. There is no way out of it for us, if we keep playing by the reformist rules, and men know it. Except for when we dare to say so. Then it’s suddenly all in our minds, or we’re just playing the victim, or we didn’t do enough to protect ourselves. I would like to take their rhetoric about self-protection literally, and have guns issued to all women and girls. I’d like to see all women and girls just get the hell away from men completely. Liberal feminists don’t approve of this idea because it’s making women responsible for preventing male violence, but apparently we are also responsible for reforming men, so which is it, Libfems, according to you? You’re all full of double speak; we shouldn’t have to go to the trouble of carrying a gun because it is the violent man who wishes to hurt/rape/kill us responsibility to not do the things he wants to do to us. So not carrying a gun and getting killed will at least prove the point that the onus was on him to not hurt/rape/kill me (how reassuring!). Yet at the same time, it is our responsibility to believe in men and to reform them?

Liberal feminists still think that men will magically, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, somehow become reformed. Radical feminists know that they will not. There is no way out here if we continue down the reformist path. This is the truth.

Are men aware of their condition? Re-blogged from Cherryblossomlife

I would like if I may, to take you on a strange journey (sorry, just had to), read this post by cherryblossomlife, about the genetic inferiority of the male of the human species. This provides us with answers to the eternal women’s question: “What the hell is wrong with men??”

This post made a light bulb come on for me, and that has not happened since I discovered Twisty and I Blame The Patriarchy back in 2006. Women are the true default human beings and men truly are our natural predators. We have always known this deep down.

Where to begin?

I think it’s important to begin a post like this by providing some context. You can’t just ask, “Are men aware of their condition?” and then simply proceed to discuss said condition, especially when men are reading. You need to offer some background so that people know where you’re coming from; so the post can’t be distorted; so nobody can play ignorant.

How about a list of atrocities then?

But if we go there eyes begin to glaze over… It has become mundane. Male violence is mundane. The torture, pain and death of women is a trivial banality.

Well, a light discussion on porn, perhaps?

How about the current trafficking of women into the slave trade?

The rampant environmental destruction?

The pollution of the entire food chain?

The unnecessary experimenting on animals?

Or maybe a chat about war? Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps?

The massacre of the the Russians by Stalin, the Chinese by Mao, the Cambodians by Pol Pot?

Or let’s talk about men who chose not to massacre their own people, and opted instead for the people next door. The Japanese in South East Asia, the Americans in Vietnam (or on their own doorstep– the native Americans), the British in Australia etc etc ad nauseum…

Then again, maybe individual atrocities would have more impact. Take, for example, the Australian man who killed his four year old daughter by throwing her off a bridge to her death to spite his ex-wife…

At any rate, all roads lead to one point, which is the burning times.

For those readers who may not know, men systematically massacred over nine million women over the course of many centuries, and then pretended it didn’t happen. So clearly, we’re not talking about institutionalized misogyny here. This is not “sexism“, or “woman-hating”. What men have done, and continue to do to women is, I believe, the inevitable result of some pathology in their genetic make-up. The violence they commit is inevitable. They were born that way, and were born to do it. This we must accept.

Let’s look at the Y chromosome, because this is where the answer lies.

The Y chromosome is inferior to the X. It contains 78 working genes, compared to approximately 1,500 working genes on the X chromosome. As the Y passes from father to son, mutations accumulate slowly over the generations. Scientists are researching the decline of the Y with great frenzy at the moment. Take, for example this recent study on some families in a Chinese village:

“Having identified 23 candidate SNPs — or single letter changes in the DNA — they amplified the regions containing these candidates and checked the sequences using the standard Sanger method. A total of four naturally occurring mutations were confirmed. Knowing this number of mutations, the length of the area that they had searched and the number of generations separating the individuals, the team were able to calculate the rate of mutation.

“These four mutations gave us the exact mutation rate — one in 30 million nucleotides each generation — that we had expected,” says the study’s coordinator, Chris Tyler-Smith, also from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “This was reassuring because the methods we used — harnessing next-generation sequencing technology — had not previously been tested for this kind of research.”

What this means is that with each generation, males are becoming genetically more inferior to females.

“Once upon a time, the Y sex chromosome looked much the same as the X sex chromosome. Both were X shaped, and matched up neatly. Like our other pairs of chromosomes, the two sex chromosomes exchanged genes as necessary to repair DNA and avoid harmful mutations.

Then something went badly wrong. Around 166 million years ago, a huge chunk of the Y chromosome in one of our mammalian ancestors was turned upside down and reinserted. The change was so extreme that the Y chromosome no longer matched the X, and it became impossible for the two to swap genes. The Y chromosome began collecting mutations and losing genes, ultimately taking on its characteristic Y shape as a result.

In humans, it now carries a mere 19 of the 800 genes it originally shared with the X. Given that rate of loss, some geneticists have predicted that the chromosome will lose its final gene in 4.6 million years.” (New Scientist)

Men are loathe to admit it. Despite the evidence staring them in the face, they are apparently in denial.

Female longevity is not an accident. The Y chromosome is faulty, whereas the X is full of life-preserving properties. Take color blindness . This genetic fault manifests only in males, because females have their second X as a back up (kind of like having a second kidney in case one fails). Almost all intersex babies are male but doctors pretend they’re female. The only intersex people who are female are those with Turner syndrome. Wiki says “Turner syndrome only affects females” but this is not exactly true. Turner syndrome babies are born without an X. Males who would have been born with Turner syndrome are probably miscarried early on. They die because there are no genes in the Y to preserve life. Whereas if a foetus is female, they have their second X as a back up, and are therefore born alive. So it is not a “female” condition per se. What actually happens is that only females survive.

So while the Y gets more faulty with each generation,the X has remained almost as pure as it was millions of years ago, meaning that females are far more biologically resilient than males. That’s because females, not males, are the original prototype for humankind.

Mary Daly was fascinated by men’s obsession with DNA and cloning, and she realised it was because male scientists are well aware of the faultiness of the Y. She perceived that they were striving to change their fate before time runs out, before the Y has deteriorated to the point of no return, perhaps.

From page 217 of Quintessence:

“Radical Elemental Feminsts naturally push the question of the purpose of biotechnology further. We begin by asking: Why the accelerated, frenzied activity of geneticists in recent years? In case the Haggard Searcher doesn’t already have a clear idea of the probable motivation for this sense of urgency, she can find clues in an article that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on March 15 1997. The article states that at some point in the distant past the Y chromosome’s genes became obsolescent. As a result the Y shed them and consequently grew shorter and shorter:

Its shrinkage seems likely to continue, to the vanishing point. But geneticists are not yet declaring men candidates for the endangered-species list. They believe a different mechanism of sex determination will eventually evolve, maybe with a single X causing maleness, or with the male-determining gene jumping to a new pair of chromosomes and the story of X and Y starting all over.”

The article goes on to describe the Y chromosome as “unstable and flighty” and to acknowledge the X chromosome’s evolutionary stability. This material may be anxiety-producing (de-stabilizing?) for flighty male scientists, causing them to feel impelled to find ” a different mechanism of sex determination,” that is, to seize control of biological evolution by gene manipulation before the vanishing point arrives.

The news has been out for some time that males have a genetic deficiency. It simply has not been allowed to spread…. Ashley Montague wrote, “There seems to be a conspiracy of silence on the subject of the superiority of women.”

All radical feminist theory and analysis leads to these questions.

I’ve been given permission to quote a comment by the brilliant WitchWind, which was sent to me via e-mail, and was originally intended to be a comment on a post at femonade. When I first read it, I have to admit I did a double take. It was as though I was censoring my thoughts. I felt I was committing ”thoughtcrime” and it felt frightening. I believe that the only reason Witchwhind herself did not censor her own thoughts was because her comment was not supposed to go public. The fact it was sent privately and was never meant for public viewing is the reason she managed to let go and ask all of the important questions, the ones that are the holy grail of radical feminism.

Before you read it, let’s put the idea of “thoughtcrime” into context. Men are right now torturing women, and are proud of it. We have access to photographic evidence of their exploits everywhere online in the form of pornography, the fully legitimized political torture of an opressed group. They are actually hurting women as we speak, actually causing physical pain to them, getting off on women’s tears and bloodshed. By contrast, what you are about to read is words. Nothing but words. Do not allow patriarchal propaganda convince you that words on a page, and torture, are one and the same.

I would like to express how the knowledge of men being innately violent + a mutation has affected me in my everyday life. I knew that male violence was related to male biology for a year 1/2 maybe? (in that only men could be violent in that way and create a patriarchy) but when I read Sonia Johnson’s book where she explained how men were a mutation, this changed my sentiment to men. At first I was really happy to find this out because it made complete sense, in many ways (too long to explain though). It comforted me in ignoring men and acting as if only women existed, and focusing on creating safe women-only spaces. But something I never felt before, I started to feel sorrow for their state. It annoys me because I have never felt sorry for men before, only contempt, or ignorance at best. I look at them and I imagine what it would be like, knowing somewhere, deep down, that you are flawed, a mistake, and that your are dead, or not fully human, or inherently destructive, and if I knew that, I would probably kill myself. To imagine feeling this made me feel sorry. Do they know it? Or do they not fully understand it? All these efforts in making women believe we are aliens, non-human, naturally and internally flawed, walking defects => this is them projecting on us. They must know on some level they are flawed, but do they experience emotional pain from it? Do they feel emotions at all, or do they just pretend to? To which extent? Are they aware of their condition somehow?

The thing is, if I treat them as mutants, what’s stopping us from killing them? Empathy? Fear? Fear of hurting ourselves, or that it will destroy our soul to do so, because being violent to someone means cutting yourself from emotions, therefore being more dead inside? Would it be bad to kill them all? To what degree does violence affect them or not? Can they only be affected by violence, and nothing else? Do they only understand violence? How does this affect our actions and decisions to take power away from them?
Also, I just realised yesterday that no man is part of me, and that litterally, I don’t have a dad, no woman has! I just understood the meaning of having the genes from my mother and my paternal grandmother. Only women are my people. Men do not exist within me and I have no father. My father is not my father but he is no-one. This may sound odd but it just struck me. And at the same time, it made me feel sorry for him. And the story Sonia tells in her book sisterwitch really resonated in me, when she explains that women felt sorry for those feeble beings and tried to feed them. Obviously I would never do that but it’s just strange to feel this. This is not a political statement, just to share the effect the knowledge has on me and I’m still processing the conclusions to be made from it in everyday life interactions with men. Perhaps it’s trauma bonding. Or over developed empathy towards dominants. How has this knowledge changed your sentiments towards men, or way of interacting with them, if at all? Other than female separatism, are there some conclusions you have made in your lives based on this knowledge?
To which I replied:

What you were saying about no woman having a dad, I’ve been going there with my own thoughts recently as well, stemming from my experiences with my own father, and the way that my husband is with my children. They’re not his kids. They don’t have a father. He might regard them as a appendages: get a wife, get a house, get some kids, and in that sense they’re his and belong to him, but other than that, he’s just an alien in the home. He helps out a lot with the kids, which I used to appreciate, but now I realise it’s another form of dominance, of trying to take over in the home and piss all over the place, leaving his mark. I’ve also realised that my 6 year old daughter humours him. How much mental energy is this taking out of her?? She certainly does not humour me, LOL! It’s no holds barred when it comes to telling me exactly what she thinks of me at any particular given moment.
To answer your question about whether men experience emotional pain. I have a lot of brothers, have had various relationships with men and I’ve concluded that when they’re children they feel pain and are as close to female (i.e human) they’re ever going to be. But once they hit puberty they no longer feel emotions. They know that women do and “other” us for it. My husband was putting on one big fat act while we were “courting” before marriage. This has blown me away. If I wasn’t in such a vulnerable situation (in a foreign country with kids) he would have had to carry on with the act throughout our relationship, as almost all men do. But because he didn’t have to bother he practically dropped the act as soon as the ring was on my finger.
And she commented further:
Yes it’s interesting that you talk about your brothers because the other day I made the same comment to myself, as I was at my grandmother’s house looking at my family photos and when they were 3, 4 years old they actually looked human, had human expressions, you can see it in their eyes. But now, They’re lost, they lost capacity to emphathise. Puberty *is* the turning point.
However, I do very much believe that men experience one particular emotion very strongly— self-pity. I concur with the author of the following (taken from no pomo tumblr, author uknown)
“Oh, they have toes, but the only feeling men have I’ve witnessed is self-pity. They have a lot of instincts like territoriality, protect your turf or woman, whatever they think they own– but I don’t call ball ingredients like testosterone, feelings or emotions. So isn’t it curious that you can’t even get most lesbians to say they’re man-haters? Instead they say, “Oh I don’t really hate men, now that I’m a lesbian, I never have to be around any. They just don’t affect my life anymore.’ This is what I call the lesbian false consciousness. When don’t we have to be around men? Don’t we ever walk the streets, buy groceries, deal with some patriarchal bureaurcracy, ride subways, trains or drive cars, see police, repairmen, don’t men live in our buildings in the cities or live around you in the country? If you work, aren’t there men around supervising you? If you’re in school, don’t you have any men teachers or have to sit with men in class? If you go to a hospital, aren’t there any men doctors or patients around? The lesbian answer is, “Oh, those; well I never pay any attention to them.” Take a good look next time you’re in what they call public which means man’s world; look at those men you don’t know and dig on how much attention your body and mind pay to trying avoid paying any attention to pigs, who are paying a lot of attention to you making sounds to scare you, stepping in your way or not moving so you have to walk around them or yield to their right of way…. Even the most down and out bum in New York has a whole repertoire of intimidation numbers to pull on women. No matter how far down you go in the prick hierarchy, every prick knows how to corner a woman, make her feel unsafe. And they all do it every day, even your good daddies and your shy brothers who never told you what they do to the women they don’t know.”
And while we’re on the subject of men’s primary emotion being self-pity, and not much else, I’d like to quote a woman from a forum called SAAFE, which is where prostituted women gather to support each other and share techniques on how best to survive. I find it interesting to read their comments because these women know men better than any other group of women on earth. One woman there asked a question on how best to deal with a manipulative and boundary-pushing client. The idea was thrown around that maybe he had developed feelings for her, that he had fallen fall her, perhaps, whereupon another woman replied:
“The bright side of this situation is that this guy has been an absolute poster-child for what to AVOID AT ALL COSTS from any client. If you wrote out a big, bullet-pointed list of his behaviours, as outlined by yourself above, and pinned it up on your wall somewhere, you could check it regularly and make sure to NEVER EVER see anyone who does ANY of those things, and then you’d be safe from 90% of the unpleasant types straight away! It’s a tough lesson to learn in life – that there are people out there who will treat you like an idiot, and will take everything they can from you without even a split-second’s doubt or empathy about what they’re doing – when you’re a decent human being yourself, but it’s important to learn quickly. These mini-psychopaths, as I think of them, are sadly common and are usually really good at toying with emotions (i.e. this guy, trying to make you feel like you owe him something because of his “feelings” for you, when I would actually bet $10,000 right now that he’s never had a genuine feeling in his life apart from self-pity because he can’t get enough attention from ladies without playing these sorts of absurd games with prostitutes) so please don’t feel like you need to feel sorry for him even one second longer. He’s having a right jolly old game with you.There is no limit to the effort he will put into his boundary-pushing with you so I wouldn’t ever see him again. Cut off contact”
And if anyone knows about how men tick, it’s prostituted women. They need to, or they wouldn’t survive.
And BAM, there you have it. A prostituted woman reaches exactly the same conclusion as a lesbian separatist. That tells us something.
Now let’s end with a bit of Guardian:
“In the end, males are uncertain little creatures and the way they are made is very different in mammals, birds, insects and worms,” said Steve Jones, author of the book Y: The Descent of Man and professor of genetics at University College London.

“In the long term we are all dead, and that is certainly going to be true for the Y chromosome, which is rather an arriviste on the evolutionary scene. It may take a long time, but I am pretty confident that the Y machine will, one day, be replaced by something else. Quite what that will be, you will have to ask me in a hundred million years.”

“The question is, is the human Y chromosome hanging off a cliff edge and about to fall, or stood on a ledge and happy to stay there forever? Realistically, we won’t nail it without a crystal ball,” said Griffin.

“Everyone agrees that the demise of the Y chromosome, if it happens, does not mean the demise of the human male. All that will happen is that the process of sex chromosome evolution will start again.”

Griffin, who posed the question of the Y chromosome’s future to the conference in Manchester, later asked men and women to vote on the issue separately. When asked for a show of hands on the Y chromosome going extinct, women outvoted men two to one. When asked who thought the Y chromosome would survive, men outvoted women by the same margin.” Guardian, 2012

To conclude, I believe men do have an inkling of their condition. The world they have created is a living manifestation of this knowledge.Nature is on the side of females. We’re nature’s best, which is probably another reason why men hate us so much, and patriarchy promulgates lies about it, and constantly reverses the truth. The most absurd concept of all is the idea that there is a male God in the sky, who is the source of all life, who created Adam in his own image as the original prototype, with Eve as an add-on. Nature knows this is a reversal. It is males who are the add-ons to the species. They protest too much. They know, they know, they know.

Andrew Elder politically homeless? Political landed gentry more like it.

We have discussed this before; the issue of dudely political bloggers of the small L liberal persuasion, and their consistent failure to actually see women as part of the political landscape (and their consistent failure to reflect on this consistent failure, and you know, LEARN).

Today I want to talk about Andrew Elder, who writes the poliblog “Politically Homeless” a male groupthink blog, and a particular discussion that has been happening there over the last week. Elder claims to have been a Liberal Party member, among other things, back in the day. He also claims to have been a”libertarian punk” whatever that is supposed to mean; sounds like an oxymoron to me, but whatever. He presents himself much the way that P.J. O’Rourke does – a dude who as a youngster, used to be kind of wild and edgy but who also cared about social justice issues, but has now seen reason and is therefore presenting a balanced view. He also, curiously, claims to be politically homeless. Yeah right. For someone who claims to be politically homeless he sure behaves with a sense of entitlement more consistent with someone who is a member of the political landed gentry class. He’s a consistent promoter and recipient of male supremacy. That’s his political home, and it’s more like a castle really. But of course he wouldn’t see that as political. That’s just the natural order of things. By his own admission he disdains the “interest groups” that “flit” around australian politics – see, he’s above all that nonsense like feminism, he is a voice of reason, a noble source of fresh, manly wisdom, writing as a lone outsider who is really safely tucked up within. Delusional. You get the picture.

Elder pretty much sticks to blogging about how crap australian journalists are as though this is news, or some recent phenomena instead of the way it’s always been, or as John Pascoe Fawkner put it in 1828, [that his newspaper] would be “devoted to the support of the Government…”. The latest post is about the Obeid drama, which is in the papers almost every single day. It’s not really news. Corrupt men, abusing power and exploiting anything and everyone within sight, for personal gain – not news. Male supremacy is the default situation right across the planet and has been for thousands of years. But men who don’t have as much Stuff as some other men, love to talk about every individual example of this shit all the freakin’ time, as if each example is somehow unconnected to the broader context of a male-infested planet. Snore.

In this particular post, Elder chooses not to actually blame men for the hideous shit that men do, but instead goes after a woman journalist who he accuses of not doing her job to expose Obeid all those years ago. Because a lone woman can totally stand up to male supremacy and like, stop shit happening! We all know how angry and emotional men can get when we say perhaps they should not do x, y or z. That perhaps they’re not the glowing examples of human decency that they’re working so hard, around the clock, to convince us that they are. We know what happens to women who call men out. Draw a small dagger on the giant beast of patriarchy and it will eat you alive in a second. Women simply cannot win; call men out and we’re fucking heartless bitches. Don’t call them out and we’re blamed for the bad things that men do. Elder is actually doing the exact thing he is accusing Anne Davies of – not blaming a man for something he has done. Much easier and culturally safer to blame women for men’s total disregard for nature and humanity. As it turns out, this particular journalist actually was doing her job in investigating Obeid, so much so that Obeid sued the paper that she was working for at the time. Elder conveniently left that part out of the story but he did not like being reminded of it. Like I said, do not tell a man he is not nice, or wrong about something, cos men are really really nice ok, bitch?

The OP is not really any more snarky than all his posts directed at “bad” journalists. However, when Anne Davies herself posted in response, pointing out the inaccuracies in his critique, his replies get really nasty. He refused to publish it at first, then he lost the plot completely and forgot all about the topic, instead turning it into a soap opera about how unfair Davies was being to him personally. He plays the victim and whines about being tarnished with the dreaded “slur of Misogynist”, and sputtering at her that she is ” lazy, not smart enough, careless, idle, petulant, desperately silly” to level such a “flimsy, dirty slur” like that at him. Too far, Anne, too far. Because women do not get to define themselves in this world. Men get to define women and tell us stories about who we are and what we do and what we experience and how, and men’s accounts of this, written or verbal, are undeniable truths. Men control the knowledge pools in this world. Men get to destroy the joint and then say, with eyes wide open, that women are destroying the joint, and then have that lie taken seriously by many many people, lending it political traction. Anne Davies accused Elder of misogyny and that’s when he really got his feathers ruffled. As did several other commenters. As is typical in blokey blog spaces when a woman dares to drop the M Bomb. Because unless they are out raping and mutilating women 24/7 they can’t possibly be misogynist – they’re the Nice Guys. They’re the ones who don’t have to do all the dirty work of physically annihilating women because there are enough other men who will. They just sit quietly sanctioning it in order to benefit from the system of male dominance that it perpetuates. Then they get to write the stories and to say there is no misogyny and women are crazy bitches to say there is. Guys like Elder think that misogyny is nothing more than individual thoughts of individual men who hate women, rather than a bigger system of oppression that all men benefit from. This is not rocket science.

The other thing that annoys about this post is that he ambiguously refers to the “Bulldogs scandal” without bothering to clarify whether he is referring to the salary cap scandal or the time when several Bulldogs players were accused by a woman of gang rape. Because men raping women is so far off the radar of male political bloggers that Elder can write “bulldogs scandal” and be confident that everyone will know what particular scandal he means, that he is of course talking about men and their money, not the silly issue of sex-based violence and oppression experienced by half the world’s people. This is rape culture and misogyny in practice. The great forgetting of women’s lived experiences, and the replacement of memories with male perspective. Because it benefits all men to not refer to the things that men routinely do to women and children with impunity. Ever. Like it benefits all men when men go ape shit at a woman for daring to stand up to them, like Elder has done with Anne Davies. Men only need a small excuse to turn on women who expose men as not the nice guys they tell us they are, and intimidate them into silence and complicity. Men keep women silenced and compliant in this way, then they use that silence and complicity as evidence that they must be nice guys, because silence and complicity. Elder thinks he is being all gender-neutral and simply criticising just another journalist* totally oblivious to the underlying misogyning oozing out of his responses and completely without any objective assessment of relative power. But this is not a part of Real Big P Politics. This is just the natural order of things. Because men say so and in a male supremacist world it is ideologically impossible for a man to be wrong about male supremacy.

*It is in fact his second attack on a female journalist in the space of a week. The first one has a thread of sexist comments also directed at that journalist which Elder failed to acknowledge, but hey he’s defo NOT a misogynist ok? And any woman who says he is, is a dirty, lying desperately silly bitch who should just shut the fuck up now.

WordPress practicing censorship

Yeah you read that right. Men are censoring women because some other men told them to. Because we all know that in a patriarchy, women should just shut teh fuck up, right? As stated on Femonade, it now appears to have become against the law to discuss radical feminist theory. Because radical feminist theory is based on analyses of sex-based power differentials, sex, not gender, biological circumstance, not a construct or an “identity” but actual biological sex and the oppression of female humans because of it. Therefore if it is determined by men that discussion of female-specific biological-related experience and oppressions such as the rape of female children, exploitation and control of reproductive functioning, pregnancy and childbirth/raising, the outlawing of abortion services, being pornofied from birth onwards, being expected to tolerate boys looking up your dress from school-age onwards, boys on the school bus groping you, being socialised to always smile and be “nice”, being expected to do all or most of the housework, growing up with that entrenched awareness that you are a target for certain kinds of violence and that this is “just how it is” and also probably your fault, public abuse for being read as lesbian, menopause, is discriminatory, because trans, then it absolutely is going to be against the law to discuss radical feminism. Therefore, WordPress will censore you, shut you down, shut you the fuck up. If this then is going to be a legitimate premise for censorship, it will follow that any women, feminist or not, can (and will) be censored for discussing same; for discussing those things which they, due to biology, experience. Therefore , it should follow that it can (and will) be technically against the law to be born female. This is where we’re at now. Strangely, or perhaps not strangely at all, the liberal feminists online have chosen to turn the other cheek to WordPress’s encroachment on their liberal dude’s beloved principles of free speech. Presumably, they are effectively gagged from saying anything at all that is outside of the interests of collective male power. Most likely they’re still unaware. Too busy worshipping male culture and trying to impress male colleagues. As women’s collective awareness of their status in society approaches critical mass and shit seriously starts to hit the fan, it will become more imperative than ever that male-identified, dick-pleasing feminists conspire with their oppressors, even if it means posting hate speech about butch dykes and other lesbians. By the way, thanks, Allecto, for pushing us a bit closer to the wheels of that big bus – like we’re not close enough already.

That is all I have the stomach for today.

The Federal Government’s War on Mothers & Children

It’s been quietly breaking my heart to have to face the realisation, once again, that the Gillard government hate women as much as the Liberal National Party do. Around the same time Prime Minister Julia Gillard was making the world famous Misogyny Speech, which brought a tear of joy to my eye, the Gillard government and Abbot’s opposition, united to pass the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Bill 2012. They also timed it to coincide, more or less, with Anti Poverty Week. Cute. The bill, one of the most significant examples of claw-back policy to date, was passed in order to force single mothers from one social security payment to another lower payment once their youngest child turns 8 years – from Parenting Payment Single to Newstart, which is not actually a payment, but an unemployment allowance. It’s about $266.50 a week, maximum.

The use of the word “fair” in the new legislation is Orwellian. There is nothing fair about it. In a nut shell it means that single mothers who rely on the government to help them raise their families will now get less money. Quite a bit less. Reports of just how much less depend on the different circumstances of women’s social security arrangements.

Most women will lose their Health Care card because this supplement is not a part of the Newstart Allowance, which will result in poorer health for women and children. Variables such as having a child with a disability will be managed on a case by case basis and will depend a lot on who the woman happens to speak to on the day she makes an enquiry, what kind of mood they were in and how well they know the legislation. My personal and professional experience of Centrelink informs me that many Centrelink workers do not know their jobs very well at all. Quite often I had to inform them about my entitlements and requirements, and I am an able-bodied white woman who speaks fluent english. Many women will not have the social capital, language skills or self-advocacy skills to negotiate with Centrelink staff. Many will not push the point for fear of retribution or fear that the worker will report them to Community Services if they disclose domestic violence, for example. Most Centrelink workers wield power and privilege against women carelessly and insensitively.

Women will also lose the opportunity to study as a way of enhancing their income-earning capacity in the future as the Pensioner Education Supplement will now only be paid to women who were already studying when the legislation went live, and then only for the duration of the course they are currently undertaking. So too bad if your big picture plan was to complete a Tafe course or your HSC equivalent in order to be eligible for a university degree. Your capacity to engage in tertiary education while juggling child-raising, domestic labour and menial pink collar paid work outside the home, was just reduced even further. I have to wonder how this aspect of the legislation will impact on women who had already enrolled in courses for this year, but were technically not studying when the legislation went live.

Many women will, right now, be experiencing high levels of anxiety. Women who are already just scraping by because they thought they had their situation assessed and their strategies to keep their families out of poverty worked out. These women were told by the government that they could stay on the Parenting Payment until their youngest child turned 16 years. Now that the government has pulled the rug out from underneath them their long term plans have been smashed. Their chances of avoiding poor health, homelessness, and avoiding or escaping men’s violence have been greatly reduced. Social security payments for single mothers originally gave many women a degree of economic independence and enhanced capacity for self-determination, benefits which have now almost completely been eroded away by forces of economic rationalism and principles of workfarism, and have forced women into institutional dependency on the state. They have exchanged dependence on one male, private patriarchy, to dependence on the collective male, public patriarchy. This change to social security arrangements seems a bit at odds with the government’s previous statements about violence against women. “The great silent crime of our age” said Kevin Rudd when the government launched the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women. Violence which the same government also recognises as the “major driver of homelessness” in this country, as stated in the White Paper on homelessness.

It is also unclear just whether or not the issue of social security debt has been factored into this. Many women accrue Centrelink debt due to reporting requirements being so damned complicated, or because provision of information regarding reporting minor changes to circumstances is extremely unclear, even for able-bodied, english-speaking women. For example, will a woman’s debt repayments be reduced when she moves onto the Newstart Allowance? Many women do not even know the process for appealing a Centrelink debt, or just how easy it is, because the anxiety produced by Centrelink interactions is so great that women often only go there or pick up the phone (if they have one) when they absolutely have to.

It is also becoming apparent that many women have not been provided with adequate information about how the changes to the legislation will affect them or what they need to do. The Dept of Human Services website states that women whose youngest child has already turned 8 years will receive a phone call advising them of how to access payments after January 1, 2013. However, I know many women who did not receive a phone call, some because they have no access to a phone. Of the women who did receive one, many of them were not told clearly that the transition was not automatic. That is, that their Parenting Payment would suddenly be cut off after January 1, 2013, and that they would have to actually submit a new application for the Newstart Allowance. Remaining on a Centrelink payment is hard work at the best of times, and time-consuming. Women who are already over-extended through raising children, through the constant effort of just providing basic needs for children, and all the other unpaid work that women do, now have to negotiate an entirely new hurdle – right in the middle of the Christmas school holidays.

I do not buy the workfare rhetoric of “helping” women to move into paid employment. Most of these women are already doing paid employment along with everything else that they have to do to survive. The new arrangements will mean that the threshold for extra income will be lowered once women are on Newstart. So women who were on the Parenting Payment Single actually had more incentive to work outside the home than they will once they are on Newstart. On the Parenting Payment, a woman could earn up to $176 a fortnight, plus an extra $24 for each extra child she has, before her payment would be reduced by 40c in the dollar. Now she will only be able to earn $62 a fortnight, with apparently no consideration of how many children she has, before her payment will be reduced by 40c in the dollar. So like what the actual fuck, Gillard Government? Your statements about “helping” people into the workforce are lies. Filthy fucking lies. This so called “fair” legislation even seems at odds with the government’s stated economic aim of saving itself money. The costs will arise in other social service areas such as increased pressure on housing and health services.

British Social Worker, Lena Dominelli, has talked about the paradigm of the welfare state in relation to women (Feminist social work theory and practice, Palgrave, 2002). She talks about the ways Social Workers who are mostly women working to help other women, are just another sub-class of women who are dependent on the state for their income. Seeing as Social Workers get paid very little compared to people in male dominated professions, despite the requirement of a four year degree, and the great show made by the Gillard government of implementing the Equal Pay Case recommendations last month, it appears to this cynical radical feminist that divisions between women have been exploited once again. I wonder if the Equal Pay Case came at the expense of the women we seek to help. Overall it appears to be a very short term, but very vicious solution to the issue of the need to deliver a budget surplus in an election year – at the expense of women and children. What a surprise.

Edit: For people wanting more information about the changes I would suggest the Welfare Rights Network as a good starting point:

https://www.welfarerights.org.au/

1984 & Surveillance (re-blogged from femonade)

The MRA cutie pies at “a voice for men” who for anyone not familiar with them, were officially declared a hate group last year, have gone to the trouble of creating PDFs containing personal information about some radical feminists. From what I understand, this particular incidence of surveillance and invasion of privacy is actually old news and was already disseminated long ago, and even then only about 3 or 4 people knew or gave a crap. It certainly was not anything like the bombshell expose that they consider it to be:

It was the day that Agent Orange presented documentation to the world of the hateful, murderous, gendercidal, child abusing fucking sthhcum that infests the feminist community.
It was the day the truth about what feminism has ultimately fostered could no longer be denied.

I guess the world missed that memo? But now it seems that our little hatemongers have a fair bit of time on their hands and not enough to do with it, because they’ve created a new format for sharing the old information, and have proceeded to re-blog it as if it were brand new. These guys are apparently desperate for attention, like baboons banging on trash cans. But hey, now that this- of earth-shattering importance – information is finally, at long last, available in convenient PDF format, everyone in the whole world is gonna be talking about it. Well, everyone in the english-speaking areas of the world, who are literate and have access to a computer and the internet, anyway. With MRAs “the world” is code for white, straight, middle class males. Julian Assange must be so bummed he didn’t get the scoop on this one eh?

This all puts me in mind of FCM’s 1984.(Surveillance) post from earlier in the year. Because the oppressors are ever watchful of those they are oppressing. Enjoy.