March 20, 2012
by rainsinger
Part 1 covered Book 1 (Walk to the End of the World) and Book 2 (Motherlines)
Book 3 – The Furies (1994)
For some, this is the least popular book, for others, the most powerful of the series. Charnas has said in interviews, this was the most difficult book of the series to write, and took the longest (over 15 years):
“One reason THE FURIES took so long to write was that I wanted to skip over the harshest part — an actual war, or more properly a slave-revolt, of the “fems” against their male masters — and go right to a better life for all;….. just as so many women with feminist ideals wish desperately to be able to “skip” the harshest part in reality, the part where we seem to have the most to lose, and the most to suffer, the part where we demand full recognition of our humanity, and do whatever it takes to get it.”
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Posted in books, herstory, lesbian, motherhood, sisterhood |
11 Comments »
March 4, 2012
by rainsinger
Books in review; Some thoughts on the story of a speculative ultimate ‘War to End All Wars’ –
the War Between the Sexes.The Holdfast Chronicles, is an epic saga of a post-apocalyptic future told in four sequential novels written by Suzy McKee Charnas:
WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974)
MOTHERLINES (1978)
THE FURIES (1994)
THE CONQUEROR’S CHILD (1999)
THE SLAVE AND THE FREE :
(a 90′s reprint omnibus edition of Books 1 and 2)
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Posted in books, sisterhood |
19 Comments »
February 12, 2012
by rainsinger
“Food as a passion, a gift, a means of revenge, even source of power –….Women weigh up the loss of a lover, or the loss of weight; they consider whether hunger and the thought of higher things are inextricably linked; they feast and crave and die for their appetites, or lack of appetite” – cover blurb -The Anger of Aubergines : Collected Stories of Women and Food – Bulbul Sharma, India, 1998
I was once surfing channels TV in boredom when I became aware of the high frequency of images of women and food – and remembered Bulbul Sharma’s book — the social and political connections between women and food is both obvious and obscure. Food politics is bone-deeply symbolic for women in conflicting clashing paradoxes, both love/hate combined, both bonding/bondage, both pleasure/pain for women. More postcards, tourist snaps, 30-second news bites. Russian women standing in food queues. Chatting with a woman neighbour in the frozen food aisle of my local supermarket. Refugee women in some warzone preparing international AID mash. Backyard barbecues with women around the food tables– helping to toss a salad perhaps, add a dash of mayo, or hand finger-foods to a toddler.
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Posted in health, politics, sisterhood |
13 Comments »
January 13, 2012
by rainsinger
Patriarchy has been reconstructing women to “fit” within male biological norms and convenience for millennia. One of the first bits of female biology to start reconstruction was pregnancy and birthing, more recently, patriarchy has focussed on reconstructing sexuality and sexual identity. In all cases, this reconstruction removes all the uniquely female bits. As Germaine Greer in her classic The Female Eunuch pointed out, women often seek social reconstruction as castrated males, or as mentioned in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, women’s only options are to 1. Live WITH a man, or 2. Live LIKE a man.
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Posted in FAAB/MAAB, gender/jendah, sexuality (NOT PIV), trans, WTF? |
37 Comments »
January 9, 2012
by rainsinger
Not so long ago, I read about the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State, and the ensuing firing and arrests of men heralded as leaders of a community for decades, and a flurry of news articles like this one at Huffpost about the ongoing ‘Crisis of Masculinity’. Poor dudes.
To be honest, I never thought too much about bloke stuff before, not since that day walking home from school, I found my 15 year old baby brother squared off against a bunch of other boys, all reeking that feral pubescent testosterone gymclass odour after footy training.
Strong enough to peel your nail-polish and melt your mascara. Really. A lot of ballet position postures and gestures, but with snarling, drooling, and bared frothy canines between the bum-fluff. When I asked what was going on, my brother told me to bugger off, as it was “guy stuff”, and not to tell mum if I knew what was good for me.
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Posted in fashion/beauty, harm reduction, male violence, rape, what about teh menz? |
12 Comments »
December 29, 2011
by rainsinger
ANZAC Day women's march, 1984 (Melbourne newspaper photo)
One thing that distinguishes human animals from non-human animals is death rituals and ceremonies. One thing that made me a feminist, was the complete lack of human respect for women’s systematic ritualised rapes/deaths. In the early 1980s, I went to one of the ‘Women Against Rape in War’ remembrance walks on Australia’s nationalistic war day – ANZAC Day (April 25th). I was young, I had no idea the scale of the hatred and violence which would be directed at the women who marched way-back at the rear of the formal military parade, to just lay a wreath on the war memorial cenotaphs, in memory of our own war dead and injured.
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Posted in femicide, herstory, international, male violence, rape |
16 Comments »
October 28, 2011
by rainsinger
Forty years ago, in 1971 – Juliet Mitchell wrote her thesis ‘Woman’s Estate’, starting with a summary of the history of where the *idea* of women’s liberation came from:
Every Socialist recognizes the dependence of the workman on the capitalist, and cannot understand that others, and especially the capitalists themselves, should fail to recognize it also; but the same Socialist often does not recognize the dependence of women on men because the question touches his own dear self more or less nearly. [August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, 1883]
Juliet Mitchell’s thesis is presented in two parts, the first part is a pencil-sketch summary of political context and history at the time of writing, tracking the launch of the 60s women’s liberation movement in England. Like north-america WLM arose from within a context of various leftist political movements, although UK women’s experiences diverged somewhat from US women’s experiences.
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Posted in books, employment, femicide, finance, harm reduction, herstory, patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law), politics |
16 Comments »
September 5, 2011
by rainsinger
In “Gender as a Hate Crime” (Dianne Post, Rain and Thunder #41 ) it was noted that “When I was lobbying for the inclusion of gender in the Arizona hate crimes statute many years ago, the man who spoke before me said that crimes against women are so common that if they were included in hate crimes, it would overwhelm the system and no one else would get any attention.”
Indeed. I guess this is why transgender folks can achieve human rights, civil rights and hate crimes legislative protections but females can’t. Female-hatred can continue unabated without consequence or even being questioned. It is so ‘normal’ and so widespread, that it is not seen as systemic structural oppression in its own right.
One of the most common socially approved expressions of this universal Hate, is the continuing metaphor of women as animals, (ie not-human animals), chicks, cows, dogs, bunnies, and often presented as such in advertising, along with gender minstrel performance as a put-down, just as racial minstrel performance is. Then there are the cultural caricatures, the Political Propaganda, the enormous hatred and sexualised violence towards females in mainstream music, movies, advertising, TV sitcoms along with appalling western cultural stereotypes of the nagging fishwife, elderly mother(in-law), the ball-buster and the bimbo. The list is endless. If such Hatred in cultural stereotypes are applied to non-white races, it would be rightly labelled hate-speech.
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Posted in FAAB/MAAB, gender/jendah, herstory, LGBTIAQQLOLWTF, trans, WTF? |
19 Comments »
August 26, 2011
by rainsinger
I received my Gold Card for road-service club membership the other day and feel somewhat ancient, as the Gold is issued for 25 years of driving your own car.
Like many other young women of the 70s, I rallied to the “personal is political” slogans of women’s liberation (later termed feminism), because I twigged to the connection between how males treat females in “private” (or personal) relationships, is mirrored in how males-as-a-class treat females-as-a-class in “public” (or social and political) relationships.
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Posted in handmaidens of the P, harm reduction, herstory, sisterhood |
33 Comments »
August 14, 2011
by rainsinger
When the movie Braveheart (1995) was first released, there was media attention around the treatment of horses. The impalement of the horses on pikes in the battle appeared so realistic, that audiences were shocked and upset. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals formally investigated the treatment of the horses in the making of the film. We were told that the clever stunt filming in Braveheart did not hurt any real horses, any more than the human cast, but films today often provide reassurances to audiences such as ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this film’.
There is no similar statement in pornography or prostitution, saying that ‘No women were harmed in the making of this film’. There is no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Women to investigate such films made using real torture on real women.
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Posted in fashion/beauty, pop culture, pornstitution, radfem-ological images, rape |
41 Comments »
August 10, 2011
by rainsinger
Guest post by Susan Hawthorne
There is a misconstruction of sexuality in the mainstream. It says the only thing lesbians ever think about is sex. Lesbians are always harping on about our sexual rights. The thing is that as a lesbian: if you talk about sex, you are sex mad – but you are recognized as a lesbian. If you talk about climate change or poetry or violence against (heterosexual) women – you are not recognized as a lesbian. But if you talk about climate change or poetry or violence against (heterosexual) women and make it clear that your analysis is a lesbian analysis – you are sex mad.
How do we, therefore, talk about lesbian human rights and not be pigeon holed as “sex-mad lesbians”? I think probably there is no easy answer. Let’s look at some examples of abuses of lesbian human rights and then come back to these questions. But first, we must look at lesbian sexuality, and how patriarchy specifically oppresses lesbians.
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Posted in FAAB/MAAB, gender/jendah, guest post, international, lesbian, male violence, rape, sexuality (NOT PIV), trans |
14 Comments »
July 5, 2011
by rainsinger
So. I heard in the news recently that pregnant women having natural abortions (ie miscarriages/stillbirths) are now up for murder charges with life imprisonment. More ‘bad mother’ stuff. I suppose we can be grateful if they don’t get the death penalty. Witches caused miscarriages too, gave their foetuses the Evil Eye or some such, so they were burned at the stake. “Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws,” said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). “It’s turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights.”
No shit?
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Posted in femicide, harm reduction, health, kids, male violence, motherhood, patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law), pregnancy, trafficking |
28 Comments »
June 19, 2011
by rainsinger
“Continual complicity in the crime of Goddess-killing is mandatory in the Man’s world. Our refusal to collaborate in this killing and Dis-Membering of our own Selves is the Beginning of Re-Membering the Goddess –”
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Mary Daly, (1978)
“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that… You say you have lost all recollection, remember . . . you say it does not exist. But remember.
Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent. “
Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig, (1971)
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Posted in friendship, gender/jendah, patriarchal institutions (medicine/religion/law), sisterhood |
22 Comments »
June 13, 2011
by rainsinger
Guest Post by AMAZON MANCRUSHER
This post is for all of my sisters, but in particular my sisters who are involved in queer activism. Like most of my recent radical feminist writing, it won’t be popular with queer identifying people, but I believe it important for me to write about my perceptions of queer culture, because I do not believe queer will liberate women, anymore than any other patriarchal culture. For me, queer culture almost eliminated me as a woman.
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Posted in femicide, gender/jendah, guest post, lesbian, LGBTIAQQLOLWTF, sisterhood, trans |
26 Comments »
June 1, 2011
by rainsinger
Guest Post by Betty McLellan
I’ve been a feminist for a long time (since the 1970s) and I’m still waiting for politicians, community leaders and social commentators to ask the question: WHAT IS IT ABOUT MEN?
Even in the face of horrendous violence by men against women and children (Darcey Freeman; and Tania Simpson and daughter Kyla Rogers) along with allegations of high profile men raping and abusing women (Dominique Strauss-Kahn; Silvio Berlusconi); even with all the evidence we have that something’s not quite right with the male of the species, there is still impenetrable resistance to focusing on men’s behaviour and asking: what is it about men? It seems that the only people with the courage to ask that question are radical feminists.
The ability of mainstream, including mainstream feminists, to ignore the elephant in the room is mind-boggling.
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Posted in guest post, male privilege, male violence |
18 Comments »
May 28, 2011
by rainsinger
Guest Post by Julie Bindel (UK)
I am not a man hater but this is the very last time I will say it in public or in private.
Over the years I have lost count of the number of times I have worked with men to advance the appeal of feminism and to encourage more of them to support our war efforts. Despite this I have lost count of the number of times I have been accused of hating men. “She is a lesbian and a man hater,” wrote one lovely chap on a Blog earlier this year in response to an article I had written on the abuse within prostitution “which is very apparent to anyone who has seen her on television.”
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Posted in fun fems, guest post, male privilege, pornstitution, self-identified feminist men, what about teh menz? |
40 Comments »
May 18, 2011
by rainsinger
Sexualisation of girls/women as main(male)stream entertainment, advertising and pop-culture is continuing to Go-Global with Australia hosting a US-based Toddlers & Tiaras pageant – coinciding with ‘Slutwalks’ for the Bigger Girls. Kiddie-porn has gone main(male)stream, and Baby Girls can proudly join the Big Girls in learning their Slutwalks, in the pornified exploitation of females.
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Posted in male violence, media, pop culture, pornstitution, race |
19 Comments »
