Silenced

I can never write under this name again.  I thought it could be salvaged.  But Mark has followed me here.

Look for me in the printed magazines.  Maybe you’ll recognize my “tone.”  Love to all who came in good faith.

Trustworthiness and Truth-Telling

Insofar as trustworthiness is bound up in notions of loyalty, and insofar as loyalty itself is a conception of whitemale supremacy, I think truth-tellers are among some of the least trustworthy women around.  A woman committed to telling the truth always and all ways will betray you every single time if you entrust in her an obligation to lie, deceive, or withhold relevant truthful information.  This instilling of obligation to falsehood is, unfortunately, a chief principle in this patriarchal concept we think of as loyalty.

The problem, I think, is that loyalty under whitemale supremacy so often means devotion to a particular person, rather than to particular truths.  And, of course, because any given person can have as many different personnas as there are stars in the universe, depending upon the atmosphere, present company, and other factors, well, loyalty to one person necessarily means loyalty to only one facet of that person’s whole being, often to the complete denial (or, at least minimization) of the existence of these other, perhaps not so flattering, faces.

A truth-telling woman absolutely cannot be trusted to be loyal to any one person, which is generally, I think, what people mean when they say “trustworthy,”  that the person in question can be trusted to be loyal to them.  But I think truth-telling women can be trusted to do other things, valuable things, things that to me are more valuable than the hush-mouthed truth-denying, the blood-silence that anyone living in patriarchy could buy with enough money or status anyway.  That which is valuable in whitemale supremacy is not valuable to me.

*Thanks, (do you want to be named?), for inspiring this post.  Let me know if you ever find that passage about trust, or remember which book it was from.

Losing Focus or Honing In?

I never can decide which it is I’m doing when I choose to emphasize the words and behaviors of the women who surround me, rather than those of men.  Am I losing sight of the men who ultimately benefit from the struggles between other women and me, or am I taking feminist advice to center women to its logical conclusion?

I think that at a certain point, it does become necessary for the oppressed to deal with the inequalities amongst ourselves – whether we are disparately favored siblings, unequally tolerated racial minorities, varyingly rewarded class strata – before we are able to confront the oppressors of us all as a united force.  (Well, as united a force as is possible given the fact that I now see men’s-women as being as much the enemy of women’s freedom as men themselves.)  I think it is important that we all face up to the fact of our having been used – our very physical beings having been used – by this hierarchy in the oppression of others.  Just by the fact of our very existence within this framework, we have been used; we are being used, at this very moment.

My body, marked as it is in all of the socially meaningful ways in which it is marked, is itself a tool, elevating and debasing others as a result of the comparisons that are constantly being made in patriarchy.  Everywhere I go, someone’s lighter or darker, smarter or slower, taller or shorter.  Under these circumstances, it is absolutely imperative that those of us oppressed and oppressing by these measurements *acknowledge* the lies that have been told, the exaggerations that have been boasted, the belittlements that have been spat on behalf of this system.  We have to do so in order to learn the truth about ourselves and each other.

We have to learn to see ourselves and each other all patched up, as if patriarchy had never happened to us, with the self esteem all there, and the confidence and the love and the inquisitiveness that’s been drained or beaten out of us.  We also have to learn to see ourselves broken down in ways, too, broken down in ways that patriarchy built us up.  We have to learn to see ourselves and each other with the smirks wiped off, with a wrench in our swagger, with us taken down that peg or two patriarchy stole from someone else on our behalf.

So many “feminists” want to reclaim self esteem lost to patriarchy, but don’t want to renounce any of the self-satisfaction it brought, especially the self-satisfaction of a belief that one has done it all for oneself, with no help from privilege or social status.  It’s that self-satisfaction, I think, that prevents the privileged from learning from the oppressed.  Why should they start listening to what anyone else has to say now when they’ve pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to this point, after all?  It’s a shame they don’t realize that a “knowledge” bereft of the insights of the oppressed is simply more of what the patriarchy had planned for them all along.

Perhaps it’s an abdication of some feminist obligation for me to focus on women doing each other dirty for a crumb of stolen self-satisfaction, rather than the men who sit back and laugh at us all, whether we’ve been tossed a crumb or not.  But I don’t know.  I think the only way we’re going to get ourselves out of this situation – fighting over crumbs and being laughed at while we do – is to work together.  I hardly think appealing to the men from our splintered factions is going to get the men to take their boot off our neck.  Not when there’s – at the very least – entertainment value in letting us women scrap it out.

Technicalities

Single-womanhood, whether alone or in combination with motherhood, is not a technicality.  It is a real, lived experience.  It is the experience of living life as a woman without the support of a man in the domestic sphere, whether financial, social (status gained just by having a man around), or parental.  Lack of a marriage certificate does not make a woman who otherwise depends upon the support of a man in her home single, except in the most technical sense.  But singlehood is not a technicality, as I’ve said.  It’s a political state, like poverty and unemployment.

So, while “starving” students living in condos and driving Porsches on their parents’ dime might count as unemployed and possibly even poor due to the fact that they don’t actually generate any income for themselves, I hardly think those kinds of technically “poor” or “unemployed” people would be justified in appropriating the experiences of people who really and truly don’t have access to any resources.  I wouldn’t want those people calling themselves poor; I wouldn’t want them calling themselves unemployed.  And I don’t think women with male support in every fashion but the actual marriage certificate should be appropriating the experiences of women who are really and truly *single* – doing without male support in the domestic sphere – by calling themselves single either.

Solidarity: Joan Kelly Puts on a Clinic

This, right here, is how it’s done.

Thanks, Joan.

Now, if only *all* “anti-racist” white folks did the same (or, “feminist” men, “anti-capitalist” rich folks, etc.).  It wouldn’t be long before the bigots didn’t have anyone to talk to but each other, and wouldn’t that be nice – to have an easy way of discerning the bigots from the decent folks simply by observing the company they keep over time?  Well, one can dream, can’t she?

Slime

The filth of women is a central conceit in culture: taken to be a fact; noted, remarked on, explicated, analyzed, poetized, pornographized, satirized: genital filth, menstrual filth, excremental filth, filth down there, between the legs, in the hole, the wound oozing blood and slime, dirt and smell; the dirt inherent in the genitals or in her bad character – wash, slut, wash.  She is dirt and what she touches is dirt because she contaminates, makes unclean; her dirt is a contagious dirt, defiling whatever she touches.  As Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote in the nineteenth century: “Everything connected with woman was held to be unclean.  It is stated that Agathro desired the Sophist Herodes to get ready for him the next morning a vessel full of pure milk, that is to say which had not been milked by the hand of a woman.  But he perceived as soon as it was offered to him that it was not such as he desired, protesting that the scent of her hands who had milked it offended his nostrils.”  This is a contaminating smell, it spreads like a disease, epidemic; women, sexual lepers, the penis that should be there rotted away by the disease of being a woman; a smelly, dirty gash, diseased, contagious.

Andrea Dworkin in Intercourse, p. 233 (Chapter 9 – Dirt and Death)

…according to Freud, feces, baby, and penis are related in subconscious sexual meaning.  It is true that etymologically baby and penis are related; the word penis comes from the Old English for fetus.  Freud insisted on an important subconscious connection between these two phenomena and the turd in the rectum for this reason: “The relationship between the penis and the passage lined with mucous membrane which it fills and excites already has its prototype in the pregenital, anal-sadistic phase.  The faecal mass…represents as it were the first penis, and the stimulated mucous membrane of the rectum represents that of the vagina.”  In other words, the mucous membrane that the man touches in intercourse with his penis, the vagina, is dirty like a rectum.  The penis evokes the turd in the rectum because the man has the experience of touching a membrane just like the rectal wall. The relationship of the penis to the actual turd is evocative and symbolic, distant.  The rectum and the vagina are analogous in present time.  The vagina of the woman is not phenomenologically distinct from the mucous membrane of the rectum.

Andrea Dworkin in Intercourse, p. 238 (Chapter 9 – Dirt and Death)

When Misogyny is Not Transphobia

ALL “transphobia” is misogyny.

NOT all misogyny is “transphobia.”

So, to talk about misogyny is potentially inclusive (though not always) of the experiences of transwomen.  But to talk about “transphobia” is to talk only about the experiences of male-bodied people in feminine drag (which includes altered male genitalia and breast implants – that which is not functional is merely about appearances, which is exactly what drag is – the appearance of female social inferiority).

Because “transphobia” (and I have to put it in quotes because there is so much confusion about what is actually discrimination/oppression of transpeople and that which is simply women’s refusal to have our experiences eclipsed by the experiences of male-bodied people in drag) is a manifestation of misogyny, those of us concerned with addressing the roots of things, with taking a radical approach to things, focus our attentions on the eradication of misogyny, not “transphobia.”    If people didn’t hate femaleness, they wouldn’t hate transwomen.  On the other hand, loving male-bodied people, surgically altered or not, doesn’t really translate into respect or affection for people in bodies that ooze, bleed, run, drip, and smell like vaginal secretions.  So, there you have it.

“Smellishis Poon”

When people talk about smelly vulvas and vaginas, they aren’t talking about the way inverted penises and reconstructed scrotal tissue smells.  When people talk about slimy cunts, they aren’t talking about a lubed up inverted penis/reconstructed scrotal tissue.  They are talking about the way female bodies ooze, secrete, and smell.  They are talking about oils and mucus and fluids produced by female genitalia.  Reconstructed male genitalia do not make these secretions and odors.  That is why male people with inverted genitalia are, as a matter of safety, required by their surgeons to use an artificial lubricant during intercourse.  It is why male people with inverted genitalia are required to douche themselves.  They do not have self-cleansing mucosa down there.  They have penile and scrotal tissue, which needs to be washed with some manner of cleansing solution, just as it did before they had it inverted.

This is not to cast judgment on male people who choose to invert their penises.  It is simply to say that when people say that women stink, it is not inverted male genitalia they have in mind.

The Difference Between Ignoring Something and Just Keeping it to Yourself Because You’re the Only Person in the World Who Gives a Damn

When I ask, “Why say that?” it is not the same thing as asking “Why think that?” or demanding “Ignore it altogether.”  I truly only mean to ask why a person might say something at all that does not do anyone else any good and is in all likelihood a lie in the first place.  Really.  So, when I say that declaring a man a non-rapist is entirely useless to any other woman and is only valuable inasmuch as the (likely deluded) woman saying it is able to reassure herself that the man in question might not rape *her* in particular, it really does make me wonder why such a woman would ever feel the need to state aloud that which is only of any use to her and her alone.

I personally don’t want to hear it.  And I have a difficult time imagining what on earth the motive could be for blurting something like that out.  I really do.  That’s not to say that no one should ever think quietly to herself “so and so is not a rapist (so far as I am able to discern from my own experiences of him),” although I admit that I don’t really understand the motivation for holding that thought near and dear or anything, aside from the possibility of sheer narcissism.  I just really don’t understand why it is so many women decide to actually vocalize that very limited, necessarily incomplete, likely altogether erroneous assumption.  Perhaps it’s illogical of me to wonder at the motives of those who would place emphasis on their limited perception of one man or all men as “good” but I do.  Is there a wife/girlfriend/mother/whore/female relative of Nigel out there who can explain this to me?

Another* Double Standard

I was informed recently that the Masons do “panty checks” to be sure that prospective members actually occupy male bodies before they are invited into the fold.

Where, oh, where are all of the trans-advocates picketing, suing, and protesting this blatant “phobia” against transmen?  Why is it that male members of Elks clubs and Freemason clubs all over the country aren’t being decried as “transphobic” when they take steps to ensure that their membership is comprised only of people in male bodies, regardless of what they may believe themselves to be in their heads?

The next time some pro-genital-mutilation trans-advocate comes at me whining about that rape crisis center in Vancouver or the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, I’m going to demand proof that they are just as vehemently opposed to the “discriminatory” practices of the Masons, the Elks, and other such fraternities – collegiate, social, or professional – that require prospective members to disrobe or otherwise offer proof of their biological sex.

I can almost hear the crickets and see the tumbleweed now.

*The first one.