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

Henri Giroux on Fascism and Toxic Masculinity

How politics disposes of some people so that others follow feeling numbed if not privileged, Giroux responds to the trial against victims of rape in the Brett Kavanaugh case. 

"I mean, I think that when any group or any element of the population is seen as so disposable, is treated with such almost visceral violence, we begin to get a whiff of something that is at work here that really isn’t being talked about, and that is a kind of fascist politics that absolutely hates democracy, hates the truth, hates public participation and is doing everything it can to hide, would seem to me, any visible element of what it might mean to take this woman’s narrative seriously and to talk, basically, about the crimes that are built into the system in ways that have to be addressed." The Real News Network. Interview with Henri Giroux by DHARNA NOOR

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.

Rape Culture

Sleeping Lion

With the current focus on the Ghomeshi trial and the way victims are being branded through the courts, it would be logical to believe that choking and penetrating someone is far more violent, far more guilty than smiling and being nice.  But in rape culture the purpose of everything is to normalize rape as a way of being. To make every living entity a victim or a conqueror. In rape culture it's far more shameful to be a victim.

We are sent to the forum as gladiators whether we want to be or not. We learn that in order to win, somebody must lose. Everything on the earth is here for the purpose of being conquered by the glorious conqueror.

It's not that we are inherently evil or good.  It is that we have been, through the experiences of our ancestors, traumatized.  We have learned how to hide who we are in order to survive.  We have learned how to entertain ourselves with games that we might win so we don't address the depth and breadth of this oppression.

So it comes down to this - am I the rapist or the raped? Am I the winner or the loser? Am I the user or the used? Will I challenge what I know is wrong or recede behind the door of my home - the only sanctuary where I am allowed to be me. Will I lock those doors so no-one can get in?  Will I allow my children to enter school and the work place to be psychologically raped every time they are compared with sluts, idiots or monsters? Will I learn how to be well adjusted in this world, or if not entirely adjusted, will I survive?

The proof of this rape culture, this acceptance of violence as normal human behaviour, is the way the legal system works and media's acquiescence to power. It is not the rapist that is on trial, examined and interrogated, who must prove he is innocent, but the victim who must prove they never uttered a word, stood, sat, smiled or fluttered in any way that could be perceived as "a come on".

The purpose of rape culture is to blame the victim, to heave contempt on the tender shoots of life, and to turn innocence into powerlessness, to brutalize every diverse expression of life into silence or submission.

Cultures of rape see women as walking wombs, walking threats to man made power. Cultures of rape see men as instruments to serve the system - soldiers, CEO's, policeman, drivers, strategists - they must serve without question - and those who do question will be crucified and forgotten. Human nature is the menace and it must be reduced, ridiculed and discouraged. Misogyny will end when science has created the means to make eggs and sperm in a lab without using what nature has created.

This is the world of psychopaths who have made themselves slaves to the system so that ultimately they might make the world a playground for their egos.

This lion of justice is sleeping. Rape is not about the minds and hearts of men and women at all.  It's about the absolute triumph of the system with all its purchased institutions, over the whole of nature.

When Our Future Chooses Suicide

Gustave Wappers Episode of the September Days

Tonight I watched the news on CBC – the station I look to for commentary on the world as it is, even as I know it’s constrained with expectations from sponsors and other interests.

But I am disturbed by yet another story of a young woman,17, who commits suicide because of bullying. At least that’s how the story unfolds.  She gets drunk at a party. She is raped by a boy or boys and another boy films and posts it. (Yes it is rape if she is too drunk to know what she is doing.) Then she is called a slut. I assume these are her peers, in her school, in her society.  The cyber-bullying persists even after she moves to another school.

I wonder why the boy who raped her is not the one who is shamed, or the boy who took the picture is not named?  Are those who do the slut shaming virgins and do they understand how the word shames all women? 

In short why is the victim blamed and why after all these years of work from counselors, activists and concerned people, are we, the Canadian public not demanding the just society we grew up believing we aspired to? What has happened to our collective psyche that we accept this, that we are not outraged?

I have observed places that have been invaded by bullies (or opportunists).  Offices where people get along reasonably well, deal with conflicts intelligently, and focus on working together to get the job done.  Then an ego enters who is critical and manipulative. The good workplace erodes into a den of personal attacks, rumours,  bitterness, and resentment.  The work is no longer the main agenda.  But instead of the group acknowledging the cause, they blame whoever has the least power.

It is a pattern that ripples out.  The poor are blamed for the shrinking economy, the infirm blamed for high health costs, minorities are blamed for social breakdown, until the implosion of crises lead to despair and a rise in fascism.  The cruelest and darkest ages are not a phenomena of the past – they are the result of our inability to create the society we want.

The first society a child experiences is the family, the second is media.  By the time a person enters school they know how the patterns of power trickle down, but do we allow them the opportunity to examine and challenge it?   

When girls are raped in public (because the public is now in everyone’s pocket) then blamed, while the perpetrators brag – what does that say about the future of our society?

When our children choose suicide what does that say about the individual’s capacity to survive in cultures that do not support their worth and dignity?

Mental Health of a Species

Having been conditioned to believe that great empires are measured by the number of other nations it has conquered, and great leaders are equal to the destruction they leave in their wake, we witness the many victims of those values today.  They come in the form of six rapists mutilating a young woman on a bus in Delhi, a young man entering an elementary school in Newtown with an assault weapon and killing twenty unarmed children along with six adults, and the NRA proposing that all schools should have armed guards rather than gun controls.

Is it enough to say that those who seek power, whether it be in business, government or media, are psychopaths who have wrought this dystopia upon the land where the unnamed must duck and sweat in the hope of surviving? Or have we all been made sick and sorry creatures? Is there anything healthy that can come of us if our minds have been invaded by this power imperative?

As long as 40 percent of those who live in "democratic" nations believe they shall be spared by siding with the biggest bullies, they will never know who they are and who they can be through their own potential. As long as they feel part of the club through race, gender or religious identity, the sickness will become more severe and difficult to treat.

How can we say that killing is caused by the dissociated ego when the popularity of Presidents and Prime Ministers supposedly increases (as revealed through dubious polls) when they send their nations to war and organize the killing of millions? How can we be afraid of someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder when we blindly follow ideologies that come from the planning departments of arms industries? How can we expect our children to grow up healthy, when we think we build our economy by purchasing stuff that will be thrown out within a few years, yet dare not invest in the future of people?

Fortunately, many of our young minds have diagnosed the sickness, as have the marginalized who have been abused by it.  This is most tragically illustrated by the protest of Chief Theresa Spence.  She is saying to Canadians and Canada ~ here is your system: here is how life means so little to the structures of power, that your prime minister cannot spare a few minutes to stop the dying of a woman. See how quickly the media and its professional trolls, will dismiss her as manipulative. See how many people will blindly deny this has anything to do with them.

See.  Look.  Hear.  Feel.  This is your home.  This is your planet with its rivers and mountains. This is your family. It calls to you again and again, day after day, with its brave attempt to heal itself by reclaiming the power of life as its own.