Misogyny

After reading The Preludes to Assaults by Jane Eaton Hamilton I was compelled to post this poem on here.

Forget history, culture and knowledge. Break free

of your hoarding of facts, dates. Forget right and wrong.

Nothing means what it intends. The opposite is true

until we recognize it and then it becomes a lie.

The ideologue is the great virus, scourge of this planet.

He climbed down from his tree and turned it

into toilet paper. He tore open his mother’s flesh

to mine for gold.

Hated his kind, moulded it into a sword

made of his mother’s blood and slew his brother.

Sold his children into slavery and called himself

Ruler. Warrior. God.

Gaia is a whore and man is her pimp.

Our laws, our art, our songs, can’t rid her

of this storm, this swarm, this pandemic

this era of man who descended

from the awe and beauty bestowed upon him

by a power he could never deconstruct

this creation larger than his knowing

the stars he couldn’t reach, so instead

he sought revenge and created the order

raping every vessel of hope, each womb

of enlightenment, churned our mother’s milk

into grease, a war to be won.

So when we talk of misogyny as though

it’s simply the fear and hatred of woman

remember – it is the seed of homelessness

entrenched so deeply we blame nature

say it is natural law, say boys will be boys

corner them by two converging walls

of a doctrine so bricked no light can enter

no doubt allowed to breathe

trapped in the construct even she defends

his privilege by love’s failure to disarm

the earth he has littered with weapons

against the distant bird singing at dawn.

published in Eyewear Blink September 2015

This is our future

We are at risk of suffering from plans that others make without our knowing. Our future is our past and we begin at the beginning of the patriarchal system.

Anthropologists point to the rise of male dominance with large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes.

Survival depended on ownership and position. Maintaining good relationships with others, relying on cooperation might have been important for those on the bottom rung of the social ladder, but the higher your position and the more wealth you had separated you from the need to be considerate, to care about others beneath your position.

Marriage was not about eros, it was about joining two wealthy families together for status. Daughters were a bargaining chip in the wedding of two families. Children were chattels. Wives were forced to keep themselves, their children, their husbands, away from anything that might threaten their reputation, even though they couldn’t control the mouths of gossips.

Daughters could not marry into "good" families if their reputation was stained in any way regardless of whether it was their fault. Proving the truth would be difficult against the words of those who had influence. Intellectual exploration was harnessed, imprisoned. Answering the call of love with your body led to social isolation. Every thought act and utterance becomes a political outcome while the feelings that guide and give us joy become a potential threat.

Just how much control do we have over fate, desire and happiness, in a society obsessed with appearances, where gossips are brutal in the city of class and fashion.

War, structural violence, wealth, money and education are all weapons in the struggle for supremacy. The president of the most powerful country on the planet can behave like an idiot because those who challenge his position will be punished by all who aspire to climb the ladder. There is no shortage of those willing to torture the challenger of group think.

Eventually we all learn how to grovel at the feet of a despicable system. The winners become more shallow, more heinous, more ridiculous, because the system cannot see how it protects itself, the system casts out the original thinkers and the people who look and sound different.

Although we think we live in a democracy and feel responsible to vote for a healthy planet, there are other influences that keep us tucked inside self interest.

The professional classes may not vote for equality and fairness because their interests are linked to their own group.

Then there is the group given privilege but who have been forgotten, dismissed, marginalized. They are angry, bitter and potentially violent as their rage bubbles out. These are young men who have learned how society expects to be "a man".

Patriarchy is not about men, says an article in Psychology Today. It is about the ownership and domestication of women and their sexuality. To keep women out of the public domain they must deny and ridicule everything they like, they say, they believe and achieve. Communities which women mostly build through volunteering and their work must be ignored. Real politics must be lampooned and any "progress" in human society must be destroyed, including compassion and love.

The threat to our healthcare system, our education, our justice and search for peace, acknowledgement of LGBTQ rights, may look like separate issues but they are all connected.

As social organization becomes more aware and effective it becomes a threat to the hierarchy. Wars are organized to crush the exuberance of young men and women who are re-thinking a new kind of society. White Supremacy movement is set up to make young men feel oppressed by the changing narrative of inclusion and to cut the interrogation of capitalist exploitation of masculinity - which does oppress men and women. Right wing parties seek to undo the emancipation of men and women to keep them working for the factory that crushes the human spirit. Women who have achieved status by their writing and work are met with death threats.

Environmentalism takes authority away from the market and into the conscience of the people. The human conscience that cares for all sentient life on this planet is the only thing that can save us.

Pornography and Power

When I went to Secondary school in the UK, there was an incident  that remains vivid in my mind.  A popular boy in our class rummaged through the bag of a girl and found a sanitary napkin. He hoisted it up as a prize and tossed to another boy who tossed it to another.  It went around the classroom like this for a minute or two.  The girl who owned it was red with embarrassment. It was as though she was to blame for this.  She desperately tried to reach it, to snatch it from the laughing boys making sport of her menstrual cycle.

This event symbolizes so much about the values of patriarchy - values that have taken fifty years for me to understand.

The first is to blame the victim.  At the time it was clear to me that the embarrassment was not hers to own - it was the boys who shamefully took something from her and threw it around.

In a society where males win medals for killing more children than women can give birth to, life is merely a resource. Giving birth, menstruating, rape, assault, domestic abuse are symbols of male dominance. Hunger, pain, reflection or feelings do not count in patriarchal society. It is the record of crusading warriors and their killing that counts, that defines history and the future.

The world of family, love, nurture, comfort and compassion belongs only to the reality of the conquered and the prey.

This sounds really extreme and men who love and care for others will not agree with this. 

So what is it about the power that drives civilization, the laws and the institutions we rely on to survive that makes our lived experiences irrelevant?  What is it about this time where patriarchy stumbles into mindless brutality, that makes it so difficult to be honest about those feelings we suppress? What is it about victims of bullying and rape that they must be publicly shamed for what others do to them? How have we allowed justice and morality to be so diluted that arguments become contests between two sides fighting to win the argument without fixing the problem?

Zosia Bielski writes that we need "Concrete measures for enacting cultural and institutional change – conversations more complicated than hashtagged confessions. From the ground up, we need to start with schools imparting deeper knowledge to young minds about consent, empathy, entitlement, bodily autonomy and bystander behaviour."  We Owe Sexual Abuse Survivors More Than Me Too. Globe and Mail Opinion, October 17, 2017.

The Unconscious Bias

Walking around the Farmer's Market on a summer morning I passed two craftswomen engaged in conversation.  What word describes the opposite of misogyny? In passing I chimed misanthropy. The second woman said that is the general term for the hatred of humanity. And the question was, what is the term used to express the hatred of men, males. I moved on because I didn't want to get ensnared in this conversation I had heard from others in different times and places.

I anticipated after the two women concluded there was no opposite to misogyny in our language, they felt that a hatred of men coming from women, was not recognized.  The second woman said it's not fair.

There is no opposite of misogyny because a hatred of males has not been a systemic tool. Women became the possession of men, chattels, and the institutions governed by men created a fear and hatred towards the feminine to justify the power men were given over women.

Less than a century ago, women who spoke out in public, who were engaged in challenging the status quo were often beaten, imprisoned and raped. It was mostly women targeted during the witch hunts. It was women who were trained to be submissive and obedient to men. It is women whose character is whacked in courts where rape is the charge. In domestic abuse cases, up to now, women were blamed for violence inflicted upon them. Our society claimed they must have asked for it. A man who beats his partner claims "she pressed my buttons".  Sexuality for a man is conquest, for a woman it is slut shaming. Doesn't every woman know this? How many more examples of men's contempt for women do we need to know? Southern states that try women who have miscarried for murder? The misogynist attacks on Hilary Clinton?

It was my assumption that the women at the market were feeling sympathy for men who were being attacked by the feminist movement. This made my blood boil. But perhaps they were saying its not fair how women are viewed. Perhaps it was the opposite of what I thought.

Yes there are women who hate men but it's not supported and justified by our social system.  Hate hurts us all on a personal community level, but when hate is used to support the violence towards a whole group of people it becomes a weapon, and weapons we can't see are devastating.

Had I inquired I might have pounced in judgement based on my assumptions.  Emotions operate first. Also I was not invited to participate in the conversation. Had they been shouting then their opinions would be open for comment, the volume entering and changing the environment.

But it's times like this when I feel there is a need for conversations about civil society and social justice, and a movement for adult education. Questions such as when do expressions of hate become a crime? When should the public intervene? In what ways are we implicated when misogyny, racism and homophobia are expressed?