Angelwish is a charity whose mission is to provide gifts to children living with HIV/AIDS, asthma, diabetes, kidney disease, and other chronic illnesses.

On Feb 12^th, Angelwish gave Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine and worldwide misogyny promoter, its Humanitarian of the Year award “for all his charitable efforts over the years.”

Angelwish, a charity dedicated to an uncontroversial cause, provides strong approbation and endorsement of Hefner by giving this award. It has not seen his lifelong commitment to hate speech against women as inconsistent with the descriptor “Humanitarian”.

But why exactly are Hefner’s actions and lifestyle inconsistent with the term “humanitarian”?

The term “humanitarian” is defined as follows:

a person promoting human welfare and social reform

Through Hefner’s Playboy magazine, women are photographed and portrayed as submissive, surgically enhanced objects existing only to please men. While Hefner did not invent pornography, these images in his magazine have done so very much to normalize the cultural practice of degrading of women as sex objects. As Gail Dines says, “Hefner eroded the cultural, economic, and legal barriers to mass production and distribution of porn” (Pornland page 1).

Playboy magazine’s existence has made it socially acceptable to objectify women. It has opened the door for much more hard-core and dangerous images. It has glamorized the sale of women’s bodies for the male gaze.

These days, the Playboy brand also distributes hard-core pornography through websites and pay per view. The money Hefner donates to Angelwish has been wrung out of the objectified bodies of the women he exploits.

Surely, the creator of this empire of misogyny is no humanitarian.

Additionally, Hefner exchanges money, fame, and centerfold status for sexual relations with his “girlfriends”. These women are prostituted- they are f’ked by a man 60-70 years their senior without using protection for a chance at fame.

Apparently, Angelwish believes that exploiting, degrading, and f’king prostituted women promotes human welfare and social reform.

But how can that be?

Because according to Angelwish, women are not human.

If Angelwish does not believe women are human, where did this charity get this idea?

Perhaps it is through the patriarchal society we live in, where women in the US are paid 23% less than their male counterparts  and 1/6 of them will experience an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes. Worldwide, ¼-½ of all women have been abused by intimate partners, and 160 million women and girls are missing from the population.

Angelwish’s decision to make Hugh Hefner their Humanitarian of the Year indicates that this charity does not believe that women are human. Indeed, radical feminists know that our patriarchal culture also does not believe that women are human.

Hefner’s son Marston has well learned the lesson that women are not human. Just this week, Marston Hefner’s girlfriend filed a restraining order against him after he physically assaulted her. Says  Marston of women, “My, like, expectancy for what girl I’m going to get is, like, so f*****-up. ‘I’ve just been around really hot women my entire life, so the average high school girl won’t do it for me.”

Radical feminists pay attention to who is lauded in our society. This information tells us what values the lauders hold, and by extension, what values our society holds. We know that Hefner believes and teaches that women are not human. We know that Angelwish’s actions exist within a system of oppression that dehumanizes women. We know that Angelwish does not support the humanity of women.

We demand to be recognized as human.

and I realized that my morning had almost NO men in it. The host of the morning radio show was a guy, but other than him, there were no men. all of the music I played today was by women, all of the people i talked to were women, and if you look around my walls, almost all of the art is by women, the books are mostly by and about women (not all, but a big proportion)–my work is about women and our shared resistance against male domination, and our shared celebrations of each other. I sent a text to my friend, H_ to say “I had to tell someone, and you were the first i thought of to tell, I fuckin’ LOVE women. I woke up this morning, anxious, like always, but full of love and admiration for us nonetheless”.

Everywhere else, you would think there are no women. I went to a music festival this weekend, and most of the musicians were men. The headliner of the festival was a woman, kd Lang, oh and what a golden glorious voice she has, but all of the musicians in her band are (and always have been) men; another woman, whom i’ve never seen before, an Irish blues singer, Imelda May, all of her band are men as well. She was fantastic, too, though. One man, Luke Doucet, had women in his band, and he promoted them too. But two of them sang a duet, “Joelene (please don’t take my man)” — sigh. It seems that, in order to become famous, women have to be the  only woman. There is no room for more than one woman in a successful music career. there was a duet, The Secret Sisters, and I think it was only the two of them singing sweet bluegrass and country together. In general, though, if you want to be famous, you have to go it alone without your sisters. From that festival, and most of the others i’ve ever been to, the headlining women were backed by a band of boys. And male producers and male technicians and and and…

Movies? All men.

Radio?  Mostly men.

News papers, magazines, books?  by men about men. sometimes by women about men. it is still more difficult for a woman to be published as a woman.

I am sitting in the library right now. to my left are three men, to my right are three men.

I was visiting my friend H_ last night and she said that one of the men working on repairing the chimney in the building where she works (a transition house) came to the door. She said, “are you one of the workmen?” and he looked shocked. “I come here every day, you say hello to me every day”.  She said, “I’m sorry, I just don’t pay that much attention.”

he was not used to being invisible. This was not his experience at all.

It is ours. Men do not see women. They see breasts, perhaps, or glossy, shiny hair, or hips. They do not see us. In fact, we don’t see us. We are not visible in the world of business or politics or art or theatre or music. We have to look to find each other.

Do not tell me, though, that we are as invisible as this Man’s World made us. or that we are as ineffective as our invisibility would imply. We are actively in revolt and the rock will wear away. The women I know and the women i see, ALL of my friends are part of the revolution in some way or another. All of us capitulate in some way, of course. We have to in order to survive. Many of my friends are married, many have children, most work for some man or other, directly (he owns the store) or indirectly (he funds the drop-in centre). All of us have male relatives who profit in so many ways from the patriarchy and from our shared oppression. Most of us have men in our lives whom we love dearly. That doesn’t matter, though they love us, too, we are, to them, still women, and still invisible. As well as indispensable, of course. To men, and to each other.

If all the women and girls really did vanish, the whole house of  cards would collapse. I’d like to see that. No more porn theatres, no more burlesque, no prostitution, no shirts and chinos, no food picked fresh from the farm, no curried lentils, no hot milk with honey, no librarians or primary school teachers, no dresses, no traffic control women, with the stop signs at the road construction, no one in the grocery stores–

the men would probably go on as before for a while, because they don’t see us anyways, but they wouldn’t be able to manage too well for too long without us. They’d run out of clean underwear within a few days.  I’d like to be there when they finally notice; when things grind to a halt around them. Wouldn’t that be something to see?

If we do go on strike, or take off together someplace, all of us, can we have a big gym with lots of barbells and squat racks and lifting platforms and stuff? That’s all I ask. oh. and a washer, dryer and ironing board. That’s heaven, that is. A world of women, a gym and laundry facilities. with a kick-ass iron and an ironing board. and way in the distance, we could hear the murmur of confused men…then we’d just play our accordions louder.

heh.

A version of this post was previously published on Easilyriled’s Blog.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/02/13/424239/fox-women-miliary-expect-raped/

So should women at home expect to be raped? Statistics show that home is the place were most women are raped; by fathers, husbands, grandfathers, father and brother in laws, male friends and boyfriends.

“Approximately 40% of sexual assaults take place in the survivor’s home. About 20% occur in the home of a friend, neighbour, or relative. 10% occur outside, away from home. About 8% take place in parking garages.” http://www.oneinfourusa.org/statistics.php

As for women being in the military! Women have always been in the military, the myth that they have not has been produced by historical sleight of hand and vanishing tricks. Example here:

I conclude that there are no safe places for women and so they should be free to take up any profession they want; both the active and the inactive are subject to rape, the gregarious and the introverted, all personality types, employing every combination of defensive tactics, can be and are raped. The fact that some of these tactics work some of the time for some of the people, makes little difference to the systemic nature of the problem. If our patriarchal society supports the rape and forced impregnation of women, and it does; then complete avoidance of rape is impossible. We need political solutions, I even wonder; given that the law will not support women on these issues, if we need to lobby for a women’s court; for the handling of sex offences against ourselves and our children.

Thanks to Bess for this link.

A culture of homosexual group sex has been exposed with recent allegations of ‘sexual abuse’ by some retired fire fighters against their colleagues. These allegations have given rise to a debate on the nature of consent within group sex between men. Some sources have jumped to immediate conclusions on the matter, blaring headlines such as “Brutal Abuse Exposed” (Cover of The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 14th February). However the issue is far more complicated than that.

We need to take into consideration several important points before we make such spurious judgment on the nature of this so called ‘abuse’.

One, it is a well known fact that groups of men in dangerous occupations tend to have sex with each other. The men making claims of abuse, knowingly and willing entered into a hazardous occupation which was, and still is, male dominated. What did they think was going to happen? Cup cakes and Kumbayah? No, these men knew full well the nature of other men and they willingly entered into an environment where they knew there was a risk of sex. Haven’t they seen the sexy calenders that firefighters produce for gay men?

Two, after the so-called ‘abuse’ all three men chose to stay within their career as firefighters. None of them reported the ‘abuse’ to the police until many years later. Obviously these men were ambivalent about whether or not this actually was abuse. Surely, if the group sex had been unwelcome, they would have left their positions and reported the crime to authorities.

Three, none of the men indicated that the group sex was unwelcome until years later. They report passively accepting the ‘abuse’, none of them claim to have asked the accused to stop, nor did they indicate that they had struggled in any way. It is difficult to believe that the advances of the accused were unwelcome when no indication was made on the part of the ‘victim’ to resist.

It is obvious that these men invited group sex when they joined the fire brigade. They did not leave their employment when the group sex started. And there is no indication that they did not consent to the so-called abuse. The case against the accused is very thin. It is difficult to understand how headlines like: “Brutal Abuse Exposed” could possibly by justified.

What this incident does indicate is that internalised homophobia and a desire for monetary compensation has driven some men to deny their natural inclinations for, and enjoyment of, all-male group sex. We need to change the culture of male-dominated, dangerous occupations so that men can indulge in group orgies with other men and not feel ashamed by their natural desires. This recent scandal has exposed the shocking truth of our society’s intolerance of the natural male sex drive. We need to accept and support men who need a good group fuck before fighting fires, crime, war etc. Headlines like the one published in The Sunday Telegraph are inflammatory and ignore the realities of what men need. If you want to support our firies in their life-saving efforts, embrace the fact of all-male group sex. It is a necessary, natural, team-bonding experience that makes men, men, and gives them the impetus to keep risking their lives, day after day.

*DISCLAIMER: I do not believe a single word of what I wrote above. I was just so angry with the way that this issue was reported in contrast to the way that the gang rape of women by footballers was reported. In my opinion, they are exactly the same; in fact the women raped by footballers suffered far more than the fire fighters did in this recent sexual abuse case. Why is it that women getting gang-raped by footballers is reported as a ‘sex scandal’ but when something similar happens to a man it is ‘horrific abuse’? Yes, what these firefighters suffered was horrific abuse. It is inexcusable. It is a crime. It should never, ever happen to anyone, ever. SAME WITH THE GANG RAPE OF WOMEN BY FOOTBALLERS!!!!! And yet the above was exactly the way that the media handled the gang rape of Clare… and so many other women who have been deeply scarred by their horrific experiences at the hands of rapist football players.*

A version of this post was published here in February 2010 in response to the misogynist media portayal of the high incidents of football players gang raping young women. Both the incidents of gang rape and the media reporting were sickeningly typical.

He was a failure as a husband and father
He was insane 15 years because of liquor
But died sober
May Christ have mercy on his soul
He was no pilgrim.

John Starkwether
Silver Lake Cemetery,
Portage, Wisconsin

Here is where friend Starkwether lies,
Nobody laughs, nobody cries
Where he goes, how he fares
Nobody knows, nobody cares.

On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia

She always said her feet were killing her
but nobody believed her.

On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia

Here lies
Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good
Die Young.

Mary Ann Weems
Godmanchester, England

To the Young of both Sexes.
This Stone is erected by public Subscription over the remains of MARY ANN WEEMS, who at an early age became acquainted with THOMAS WEEMS formerly of this Parish. This connection terminating in a compulsory Marriage, occasioned him soon to desert her and wishing to be Married to another Woman he filled up the measure of his iniquity by resolving to murder his Wife. Which he barbarously perpetrated at Wendy on their Journey to London toward which place he had induced her to go under the mask of reconciliation, May the 7th 1819. He was taken within a few hours after the crime was committed, tried and subsequently executed at Cambridge on the 7th of August in the same Year.

On the grave of Phoebe Hessel

In memory of Phoebe Hessel who was born at Stepney in the year 1713. She served for many Years as a private soldier in the 5th Regt of foot in different parts of Europe and in the Year 1745 fought under the command of the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Fontenoy where she received a bayonet wound in her arm. Her long life which commenced in the time of Queen Anne extended to the reign of George IV, by whose munificence she received comfort and support in her latter Years. She died at Brighton where she had long resided on December 12th 1821 Aged 108 years.

. . .

I used to have a book of epitaphs, and as a teenager I had a fascination with reading these remarks about lives past; in quiet graveyards among tall grasses. Above are a few I have collected from the internet, some are funny, some sad, but all informative in one way or another about the lives of women.

The first one is, I am sure, written by a woman; it is a complaint about marriage carved in stone. You can feel the years of bitterness, the sense of entrapment, how this became focused on the behaviour of the husband, and the final relinquishing of the futile hope of changing him. A feminist dream of a free life and free motherhood, was simply beyond the writers imagination.
The second is just a description of an unmourned man it could have been written by anyone. I think the third is written by a man, it is funny with a sneer; in a couple of sentences it manages to evoke a life of drudgery, and how even in death, this woman’s pain was no more than a source of amusement.
The fourth is funny; another unmourned man who nevertheless survived to a considerable age.
The fifth is about the ubiquitous murder of wives, the exceptional part of the one described here, is that the husband was punished for it! Which maybe why the details are recorded on the gravestone, the propaganda of patriarchal justice parading on a monument. There was another epitaph, not included here, that advertised doctors and the details of their methods of treating dropsy, on the memorial of their dead female patient!
The sixth is about the life of a woman soldier, one of very many unsung women who ended up in the armed forces. She triumphs over the dangers of her occupation and manages to live to 108. More Stories about women who fought at the battle of Trafalgar can be found here, note they received no medals or recognition.

This is the epitaph of Aphra Behn.

“Here lies a Proof that Wit can
never be
Defence enough against
Mortality.”

This one by Dorothy Parker could only have been written by a woman

“Excuse my dust.”

I Don’t want an epitaph, but if I did, I think I would go for something funny like: There is only cake! Or, I recommend chocolate. What about, This is women’s land. What would your epitaph look like?

“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.

Childhood images, dawn on a winters morning, warm, frothy full-cream milk from our family goats and cows. Separating the milks by hand, churning butter, squeezing cheeses – slapping sister with the cheesecloths. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts agonise for weeks, months over weddings – catering arrangements are Very Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Work.

Bushfires, floods, disasters – armies of women cutting sandwiches, filling thermos flasks. Jamaican women harvesting bananas. Bangladeshi women planting rice. Mexican market-women selling vegetables. Shelling peas, stringing beans in the kitchen with my mother. Picking grapes – summer job as a teenager – in awe of the Italian women – laughing, talking, sweating, stripping the vines for the ‘table’ grapes. Teaching me my first lesson of hard-labour in high summer heat – ‘No drink –Suck on a grape – keep mouth wet. But no drink – you be sorry!’

Sleepovers at friends houses, stunned by rituals of fathers, boys served, fed first. Women, girls must all wait their turn. Hungry women, famine in Asia, Africa – women are the last to die, but the first to feel its pain, as they wait their turn behind men, children.

North-west Australia. Isolated mining town, ‘Life’s Hard on the Pilbara’ my T-shirt shouts – Iron ore country, Hammersley Iron Mines owns everything – H.I.M. trucks pepper the roads of red sand, red desert, red coastline – 12 young white women, British, Australian, Canadian, Swedish, German etc – serving breakfast, dinner in the single men’s mess – pays well, very well. 6 weeks work – overseas airfare, ticket home for some of us. A girl’s gotta eat, No? We do the maths – 1,000 single men, 12 women – pick one each sistren, or you’re free-for-all. Balancing several layers of breakfast trays of greasy eggs on our arms, the cooks slapping floured handprints on our bums. The wives in the married men’s compound glare at us, one or two nod politely, hosing their lawns in their transplanted suburbia in the desert. Judy, with her classy British accent speaks up ‘Anyone for tennis after brunch?’. We laugh. Lazing, sunning on the beach between shifts, the men lunch underground, we nibble stale pastries, quibble over canned fruit – the Black women, abandoned by the H.I.M. men who spent the night ab/using them, walk past us on their return journey to the Aboriginal Reserve – 10 dusty, red iron-ore hot kilometres inland, exiles on their own lands. We give them the cans of fruit. Promise to give them more.

The Personal is the Political. Food is Personal and Political. We define our status, class, race with Food. Vegetarian or not, kibble-wheat & rye breads, we argue Marx and Mitchell munching muesli.

Stories of visits to tropical ancient lands, discuss the spirituality, the transcendence of curries, nasi goreng, rice and coconut. Sharing sweets, nuts, savouries in bed with a lover. I tell my sistren the story of how I failed Home Science in high-school, laughing we eat my inventions anyway, hunger really is the best sauce. Watching a film – Puberty Blues – the narrator mentions the ritual of the surfer girls going to the shops to buy burgers, chips – (for the boys who were too busy surfing) –

its not cool to ‘eat in front of the boys’ she says, so the girls gobble their food down on the walk back. Why is that?

“….A significant portion of this work situates mothers as the nexus between food and pathology. Indeed, since the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis with its focus on oedipal narratives of subject formation, mothers have been a particular focal point and the move from this to women and food has often been made, both in the negative terms which “blame” mothers for eating disorders and in the more positive social goals that inform movements such as La Leche. - Cross-Cultural Perspectives On Women, Identity, Food – University of British Colombia Workshop, 1998

Play-groups, inner-city creches, mothers, babies, toddlers underfoot – the Lebanese women laugh at us for snatching away the nuts, at our fear of babies choking. In Lebanon, nuts are the traditional first-solids & their babies don’t choke, they say. A Turkish mother, heavy in black asks ‘Why can’t you white women feed your babies? Are your breasts deformed?” – defensiveness, mumblings of ‘my doctor said..’- ‘I work, you see…’, ‘I kept getting mastitis…’ blushing, awkwardness, changing the subject to something neutral – food, coffee, lunch. The Turkish woman offers to show us how to make baklava & Turkish coffee, to ‘make your milk strong for your babies’.

A lifetime of girltalk, coffee, cakes, biscuits, take-away, chocolate – collectives discussing funding, submissions, actions, over crackers, dips, nibblies and cheap wine. Kaffee-klatsches, coffee-mornings, brunches, kitchen-teas, bridal showers -
Women office workers pore over faxed menus, discuss the relative merits of seafoods and soups. ‘Let’s do lunch’ the office women say –to discuss which restaurant, what sort of food, in loving/bonding detail. Without men around we feast on Womens Business, Women’s Work, Women’s Words.

“In some recent poststructuralist work, food (and the mother’s breast) has also been specifically associated with words and self-representation (or identity). This association is foregrounded in Kristeva’s scenario of abjection in which food symbolically competes with words. But we also find it articulated in recent work addressing prohibitions or disciplinary protocols used to control groups who might other wise be perceived as unruly. Less well theorized, but certainly evident in a wide range of narratives about the forging of individual, national and diasporic identities are more positive definitions and descriptions of food as consolidating communities or genealogies ranging from the family to the nation…. – Cross-Cultural Perspectives On Women, Identity, Food – University of British Colombia Workshop, 1998

Food as language? Food for Thought, indeed!

Woman’s Language.
Woman’s Words.
Woman’s Work.

Puberty Blues girls mustn’t eat in front of the boys they are trying to impress – to do so breaks a rule.
A ‘disciplinary protocol’ to control the ‘unruly’?

Double, double, toil & trouble. Fire burn, cauldron bubble. Eye of newt, tongue of toad. Famous murderesses are poisoners. Mad, mad women slump, thump around kitchens, expressing madness with pale offerings, melted plasticware, burnt offerings, lime & bitters. Eve and Snow White, seduced by an apple, witches have insatiable appetites.

Television ads – women serving food mountains-high, smiling beatifically at margarine. Dad gets take-away, but Mum’s hands are the ones to dish it up. Magazines for women, so many about food, catering, dinner-parties, healthy lunches for pre-schoolers, diets, ‘summer-slim’ recipes. Women always serving food, but never eating in ads – why is that? Except maybe – snack-foods, directed at the adolescent market, when cartoon, or disembodied exaggerated feminine lips seductively lick phallic chocolate bars, or play, snatch, throw, steal them, peel them – but are not shown actually eating? What message does this Food Language send?

The Pornography of Food? Woman is object. Source of Nourishment, symbolic Fountain Breast of all pleasure – she provides pleasure with her hands this time – disembodied hands serve chicken nuggets fresh from the oven. Men and children eat. The woman smiles, radiant, standing while the subject eaters sit. There are none left for her – she doesn’t mind. The girls of Puberty Blues dispense burgers, chips – there is none for them – they don’t mind, they ate earlier, secretly – they smile, radiant their secret safe. Men and children first, women must wait their turn.

Popular relationship self-help books – the Mars & Venus books, use food imagery to describe the ‘healthy’ marital heterosex relationship – men need ‘quickies’ the author says, for ‘sustenance’, a maintenance ‘diet’, if women love their man they will provide regular ‘quickies’, a Gift the author says, and he will provide ‘home-cooked’ sex once a week – ‘gourmet’ sex once a month – in return. She must wait her turn, in return. She masturbates, silently, secretly in the bathroom. Reminder of the old hunter/gatherer paradigm. Hunter food is not regular day-to-day sustenance food, it is ‘feast’ food, ‘party’ food – it is rare, special, an occasional ‘treat’ – provided by the male, though not always. The greatest chefs in the world are men we are told.

Sustenance diets of ‘quickies’ in bed, and ‘quickies’ on the breakfast table are Women’s Business, Women’s Words, Women’s Work.

Announcement for a Radical Lesbian Feminist Festival – When, Where, and What’s to Eat? “….for anyone who wants to come early to help chop vegetables and plan the revolution.” –

Food is Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Work – even for Revolutionaries.

More “positive definitions …… consolidating communities”?

Food issues are political issues. Language of Food, Language of Solidarity as well as Division. Women United/Divided by Food.Globally – the bulk of agricultural workers are women, the bulk of food processing workers are women, the bulk of food is sold, prepared, cooked, bartered, carried, and shared by women.

What “messages” we send through food! Pleasing/Punishing mothers-in-law, grandmothers, just getting-to-know-you – we instinctively offer food, or offer help in the kitchen – holiday dinners, afraid to offend, or paradoxically – quick to offend – in our rebellion/rejection of the Language of Women.  We know how much it means to them to please/not please through the food they’ve prepared. We *hear* other women’s messages encrypted in the stuffing, salads, desserts, sauces. We judge other women, Reject/Embrace through the Language of Food, Language of both Solidarity and Division.

Food is the Language of women. Food is Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Words, Women’s Work – We sow/grow, harvest, pound, grind, shell, slice, chop, julienne, grate, sift, squeeze, pinch, knead, roll, bake, saute, fry, grill, shred, blend in instinctive rituals – too much, too little – never sure, the agony and the ecstasy, the paradox –we love/hate our food bondage/bonding.

“…the egg the female brings to maturity is a complete feeding mechanism…..the devaluation of the milk that has no price-tag is part of the generalised devaluation of women’s bodies and contributions to the nourishment of the race, a devaluation that is now reaching its nadir in a distorted attitude to food on the part of women themselves……..The pattern of devaluing women’s contribution is as old as human civilisation. Clearly food production and consumption have changed vastly since industrialisation, but the devaluation of women’s contribution remains a constant.”
Germaine Greer – The Whole Woman, 1999

Messages of the Women’s Language of Food get mixed-up, mix-mastered, mashed, pulped, too bland, dropped, lost, boiled off, fallen, over-cooked, burnt, too cold, too stale, too hot, too spicy, hunger, hurt – tones/tomes overloaded with too much salt or sugar, pleasure or pain.

Anorexia. Bulemia. Daytime TV discusses Stomach-Stapling Surgery and the Joy of Herb Gardens. Mad, Mad Women. Junkie women extol the virtues of appetite suppression by heroin, cocaine, speed, crack. The De-valuation of Women continues.  Weight-watchers. Diets. Obsessions. Chocaholics. Sweet-tooth.  Functions – the invitation reads ‘Ladies, please bring a plate’. Bake-sales –our grandmothers wistful for memories of cinnamon, home-made ginger snaps. Misfit women pay homage to the Joy of Food, Life, Love, Women – chopping vegetables for the Revolution. Diabetes. Heart disease. Iron-deficiency. Blood thin, blood-letting. Tiredness, lethargy, allergies. Diet Coke. Take-out, take-away, disposable. Dainty morsels only when menfolk are around. So thoughtful women are – being cheap dinner dates. Binge, feast & puke when alone, or with the girlfriends. Mad, Mad Women – we come to love/hate food, we starve, we purge, we hunger, we feel for bruised tomatoes, pick carefully through apples, obsessed with ‘purity’ we cuddle our half-litre bottles of water to flush away the poisons, we hate our bodies, hate our Selves.

Oh girls, girls,
Silly little valuable things,
You should have said, No, I am valuable,
And again, It is because I am valuable
I say, No.

Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays.
– ‘Stevie’ Smith

Mad, Mad Women – if we can’t value them/us – who will?
________________________________________________________________
A previous version of this post was published on Rain’s Place
________________________________________________________________

It’s because Dellinger and his liberal doodbro cohort are “the screwed generation.” They’re mad as hell, they’re stamping the feet for attention, and they’re not going to take it anymore! Dellinger tells us how badly used and abused his “generation” has been:

“We are the generation that continues to pay into Social Security with every paycheck but suspects we may never see the benefits of it.”

It’s completely lost on Dellinger and all the doods like him that he belongs to the class of people that has reaped the vast majority of the economic goodies for a long, long time. But, oh no, that might have come to an end!

Meanwhile, women have been paying into Social Security for as long as it has existed, yet continue to make only 77 cents to every dollar that men are paid. Women don’t just suspect that the work they do won’t be fairly compensated, it never has been, and no woman alive today really believes that she ever will be. While Dellinger is wringing his hands over the terrible treatment of his “generation” (that’s his code for “all the guys like me”), he seems to have forgotten that half of it is made up of women who get doubly shafted economically.

Does this concern men like Dellinger? Probably not; he’s too busy worrying about himself and his future.

“In short, we are the screwed generation. The decisions of those before us has left us with an uncertain future and little opportunity to fix things through traditional means.”

When it happens to men, it’s a tragedy. How dare things not fall into line for Dellinger and his “generation” (remember, that’s code). But the people making decisions “before” and now have been overwhelmingly male. In the U.S., women currently make up less than 17% of Congress overall, a woman has never been President, and all the while white men like Dellinger have made up over 95% of the membership of the U.S. Congress over the history of its existence. His gender and their concerns have been wildly overrepresented in the U.S. government, but that doesn’t stop Dellinger from making it sound like suddenly there’s a problem.

And every single person in his “generation” feels just as he does! He’s sure of it.

“The ever-present skepticism of youth is even greater within the collective consciousness of Generation Y. With our first real chance to make a splash in the world, we got behind Barack Obama in overwhelming numbers.”

Do you think he really cares what everyone in his entire generation thinks? Don’t bet on it. The young, liberal doodbros voted for Obama and what did they get, dammit?!!

When Hillary Clinton ran against Dellinger’s hero Obama, she was treated to the worst misogyny imaginable, and lost to someone with far less experience and far less knowledge because Dellinger and liberal doodbros fought tooth and nail against her. Do you think Dellinger remembers that? Probably not, but you have to be incredibly self-centered to not have noticed that women have had the vote for nearly 100 years and continue to be second-class citizens when it comes to politics, political representation, and public policy — especially when living with the results of those.

But let that happen to men? All hell will break loose and they’ll “begin to serve their own” interests. Selfish? Who, liberal doodbros? Dellinger throws down the gauntlet:

“So when the traditional liberal means of protecting ourselves — uniting behind the government to promote action that benefits the common good — no longer serves our best interest, we begin to serve our own.”

Gee, we thought that’s what they were doing when they threw a far more knowledgeable and capable politician under the bus to vote for a inexperienced man instead. Notice also how Dellinger self-consciously (the rare instance) throws in that part about benefitting the “common good” — in between selfishness Ayn Rand would applaud. Hell, she couldn’t have said it better herself:

“We have a new set of morals that have been established because the old ones were no longer cutting it. […] Many of the universal views of our generation come down to holding a permissive attitude toward the behaviors of individuals.”

In other words, “we” (him and everyone just like him) should be able to do anything “we” damn well please. You know, as long as those “individuals” are of the male variety. Because all of this outpouring of emotion has been in the service of the completely and unapologetically anti-choice, anti-woman candidate, Ron Paul.

You didn’t think this was really about the “common” common good, did you? Nope. Who do you think Dellinger is seeing in his mind’s eye when he says things like this (hint: it isn’t women):

“This is why libertarianism — and the Ron Paul candidacy — has been so appealing to young voters. […] It’s no fluke that the old guy preaching liberty and personal freedom is getting the attention of the youngest demographic, either. Because Paul supports sending social issues down to the states, he’s no longer having those discussions; he’d rather talk economics.”

Sure, except for when Ron Paul has repeatedly said that he is against abortion and will actively work to overturn Roe v. Wade. Or when he said that “those who experience sexual harassment in the work force should just quit.” Too bad if “those who experience sexual harassment” are overwhelmingly females who probably need the jobs they have and in any case, should probably be able to work without being harassed, don’t you think, Mr. Dellinger? Or were you only concerned with some people in your generation?

According to Dellinger, there’s a fight for liberty and personal freedom that must be won and people are joining that battle!

“It’s no fluke that the old guy preaching liberty and personal freedom is getting the attention of the youngest demographic, either. […] “This is what makes the Ron Paul movement truly important. His audience is overwhelmingly made up of college-age kids. […] And Paul has “continually dominated the youth vote in nearly every primary.”

Funny how that “demographic” slants majority male — by a large margin. It’s abundantly clear if one is paying attention why Dellinger and others like him think the Ron Paul movement is truly important: Ron Paul’s audiences are overwhelmingly young men just like them. The code words and fake community spirit cannot hide what the camera tells us.

But maybe Dellinger is just accidentally delusional.

“Because Paul supports sending social issues down to the states, he’s no longer having those discussions; he’d rather talk economics.”

Maybe while gazing at his own very important navel, Dellinger missed the news that Ron Paul is rabidly opposed to women’s right to choose what to do with their own bodies and has said so repeatedly. Maybe Dellinger missed the interview where Paul said that there is a difference between “honest rape” and other kinds of rape (like when women pretend to have been raped so they can get an abortion — those crafty bitchez).

Clearly, Ron Paul and Dellinger are the true freedom fighters. You just have to know what side they’re fighting for.

But wait, Dellinger said this earlier in the article:

“The fact that there are still discussions between contending candidates about whether women should have the right to have an abortion is shameful in the eyes of the youth vote. We’re done with those debates.”

Well, I guess that makes a kind of sick sense. Paul certainly is done with these debates and he has decided what’s best for all women, all the time. And Dellinger has decided that he will support Paul and claims his whole generation does too.

“There may not be a total consensus, but it’s pretty clear where the majority of our generation stands.”

Yes, I’m sure it’s all very clear if you can only see and hear what the men in your generation have to say. And women can just shut the fuck up while men like Dellinger spin the facts of the situation.

“By jettisoning social issues, Paul is able to have a conversation about fiscal policy with a bunch of kids who are growing up in a new economy.”

Excuse us, but if those “kids” expect anyone to listen to their political ideas, let alone believe that they are ready for adult conversations, they should be able to prove that they’re actually capable of understanding what Paul’s intentions are and how those would affect the women in Dellinger’s generation.

But when Dellinger (and other liberal doodbros) say things like this: “This is an example of our generation trying to take care of our own as much as it is trying to create change,” we’re going to understand that they are just like their forefathers — Ron Paul among them — who have been (and are) only too happy to keep women from having full human rights, while men continue to be the default representatives for all human experience and arbiters thereof.

–HUB Newsfeed

Cross-posted from Radfem News Service

because we all know that pregnancy can kill you, or make you very ill, even if you have an early abortion. right? (imagine sitting under your desk at work and puking into a trashcan, if it helps bring it home…not that most women really need a visual. but there is going to be someone on this thread who says they still dont get why PIV is so bad.)

this has got to be traumatic, no? i mean, how could it not be? this is a serious question.

speaking of trauma…when men go into battle with each other, they form intense, emotional bonds. in relation to each other, these men are known as “war buddies.” and its a close relationship, to say the least. the feelings that the shared experience of death-defying elicit are “intimate,” in the extreme. this is commonly known to be the case. it just is. something happens to the human mind when we encounter life-threatening situations with other people. we…bond. and women are human beings. yes, they are.

when women have PIV with men, we are encountering a life-threatening situation, with another person, by definition. not surprisingly, we form intense bonds with our war-buddies, these men with whom we have literally faced death and disfigurement. terror. the problem is, of course, that the men dont feel the same way. because theres nothing dangerous to men about PIV, really, at all. they were just getting their dicks wet. or, you know, “making love.” we were the ones putting everything on the line. and if it seems like they dont get what it is that we were doing with them…well its because they dont. nor do they care to.

heres a bit from google on trauma-bonding:

Exploitive relationships can create trauma bonds-chains that link a victim to someone who is dangerous to them. Divorce, employee relations, litigation of any type, incest and child abuse, family and marital systems, domestic violence, hostage negotiations, kidnapping, professional exploitation and religious abuse are all areas of trauma bonding. All these relationships share one thing: they are situations of incredible intensity or importance where there is an exploitation of trust or power.

bolds mine. you see, any man who demands PIV or engages in it for that matter is making himself dangerous to women, by definition. and when a woman trusts a man to keep her safe…if that man demands or engages in PIV with her, he is exploiting that trust.

“stockholm syndrome” might seem a bit extreme to apply to most het relationships that arent traditionally abusive…but theres something going on here. at least, for those of us who arent essentialist, and who just dont believe this shit about women when it comes to sex “feeling” so deeply, and stuff, and things.

because the sad, sick truth of it is that every single man with whom we have ever had intercourse is just some tool who laid pipe, at our expense. thats all. if it hurts to think about it that way…well it hurts, whether or not you choose to think about it. thats kind of my point, actually. PIV hurts and is harmful to women, but not to men. how can you tell? we form emotional bonds with men we have fucked, that are inappropriate, and not reciprocal. work backwards, if you have to, if you cant see that PIV hurts, and is dangerous to women. look at the most common “female response” to PIV (emotional attachment), and tell me it doesnt look a hell of a lot like another commonly-recognized bonding-response to having experienced extreme terror, and the fear of death.

women also manage not to stalk or murder our lovers, really, ever. they are our war-buddies, afterall. not our pets, our our property. see how womens alleged “obsession” with men really has no correlate with mens sexual obsession with women? a more reasonable correlate (besides stockholm syndrome) would appear to be a kind of one-sided war-buddy syndrome, which normally creates intense emotional bonds between people, who face death with each other, in times of war.

those are my thoughts at the moment. that, and something i might have wondered about if i were about 15 years younger, cause i dont really care at this point: if we made PIV *more* traumatic for men, would they have the common decency to pick up the fucking phone the next day, but without going all stalker?

a version of this post was previously published at femonade.

From the article:

We are also haunted by the ragged remains of the Supreme Court opinion in Roe v. Wade. Despite being disavowed by subsequent opinions and some of the individual justices, one part of that precedent lives on in the statutes of some states and the practices of several doctors: The assertion in Roe’s majority opinion that “viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks).”

The scientific claim that viability (the ability of a fetus to live outside the womb) “usually” occurs at 28 weeks has been undermined by medical advances over the past 38 years.

Children who would have died if born late in the second trimester in 1973 would more than likely live if they were born now. A Swedish study in 2009 found that preterm babies born late in the second trimester who are given intensive care survive at surprising rates: 53% of those born at 23 weeks live, 67% at 24 weeks, and by 25 weeks, 82% of the babies survive. (Sweden’s health care system makes it possible to reliably track survival rates, but the type of care provided there is similar to that available in the United States).

In the same way that the law had to change to accommodate advances in DNA evidence that can exonerate those on death row, state laws must change to accommodate that with modern medical care, a child born at 27 weeks is very likely not only going to live, but live a fairly normal life.

Yes that’s right: abortion, a women’s rights issue and a reproductive health issue, involving multiple overlapping male-centric institutions and systems of patriarchal oppression — specifically medicine, religion and law — specifically designed to subjugate women on the basis of our sex, is exactly like men wrongly convicted of violent crimes and must be treated as such. And I guess in his analogy, the fetus is the criminal wrongly imprisoned, and male technology must be allowed to save him. And clearly, the woman is the state, from which our fetus, uh, male protagonist must be saved.

There are obvious problems, of course, with framing the abortion problem in male-centric terms, and the problem is that it’s absurd, reductionist, misogynistic, and doesn’t really capture the essence of the problem (from women’s perspective) and utterly fails to get at the heart of the matter, again and again.

And the essence of the problem is that women are being subjected to PIV and impregnated, whether they want to be or not, and men have set up their institutions to attach to women’s lives and bodies at the moment of conception, in ways that these institutions never attach to male bodies and men’s lives. And pregnancy can be a dangerous medical event that’s expensive, time consuming, and interferes with a woman’s ability to work and fulfill pre-existing obligations, such as caring for existing children or aging parents, or herself.

And in the case of technology and viability specifically, men control the technology that’s going to make pre-term fetuses increasingly “viable” with no foreseeable endpoint, and they will stop advancing that technology when they want to. Men control the relevant technology, not women, so if abortion rights are tied to technological advances redefining “viability” then women’s abortion rights are subjected to men’s whims and are on a steady decline with no end in sight. This is unacceptable. And as men largely control fertility and reproduction too, being that they are the ones impregnating women through mandatory PIV and rape, it seems even more clear that the issue of women’s “choice” really isn’t; the issue of abortion and reproductive rights is an issue of men’s choice. This is clearly the truth of the matter, and again, it is unacceptable.

This business with “viability” and the ways men’s legal and medical systems overlap makes it all too clear that it’s men’s intention to control women through patriarchal institutions and overlapping systems of male power, via women’s ability to become impregnated and to reproduce, no matter what. This is just more of the same, and it’s not a valid reason, from women’s perspective, or even from an egalitarian perspective, to further restrict our access to abortion.

–HUB Newsfeed

Cross-posted from Radfem News Service

Christine Stark has been a role model of mine since 2004. That was the year she co-edited Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, which immediately soared up my book chart and remains a Berg top five today.

Not For Sale contains my favorite essay on prostitution, but Stark’s direct confrontation with so-called ‘sex radicals’ in the essay “Girls to Boyz: Sex radical women promoting prostitution and pornography” has the most forthright chutzpah of the collection. My admiration for her anti-pornstitution work led me to take special note of her various creative works released through radical feminist and artistic media.

Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation is Stark’s debut novel and it’s a doozy. The freestyle narrative announces itself on the first page through two fairy tales as understood by a small child. Stark plays with linguistic forms to translate the thoughts in a child’s mind, and it’s a testament to her skill that the unconventional style comes off much more genuine than parlor tricky. The punctuation and odd sentence breaks lend a breathless air and the cadence is tricky to catch at first, but much like watching a Scottish film, the initial confusion of familiar words in an unfamiliar dialect soon resolves and you’re hooked into the storyteller’s groove.

The story follows Little Miss So and So from age four through twenty-six. Her stream of consciousness survival of incestuous rape makes the early pages rough reading, so don’t pack Nickels for the beach. Not that there isn’t an inherent entertainment in stories of terrified and tortured children — as the stratospheric popularity of Stephen King proves — it’s just that Nickels is a different kind of horror story.

My fear to face was being forced to remember the powerlessness of childhood. Great literature makes readers see the world through another person’s eyes in a way that connects to their soul. What I saw through Little Miss So and So’s eyes was my world as a child, my own fractured soul trying to make sense of the cowardly cruelty of child abusers. Little Miss So and So was five-years-old when the school nurses saw the bruises and filed a failed lawsuit to remove her from her abusive family. I was six when the same events happened to me. There’s even a scene involving a bite-size apple pie and tears of gratitude for a family member showing kindness that rather eerily echoes an apple pie anecdote from my past. I write a lot, often about violence against women, yet I don’t write about my childhood for reasons I’m still unpacking.

History kept interfering with my reading, a feeling exacerbated by starting Nickels right before the traditionally family-infected Thanksgiving holiday. I had to keep putting the book down the same way I frequently pause while reading Andrea Dworkin, because the gut-felt truths come fast and tap on spots so sensitive that pushing past the discomfort without consideration feels like a wasted opportunity.

The years in Nickels tick by in five year chunks of time, and in the process my intimate connection to Little Miss So and So faded enough that reading felt less like picking at scabs. Stark’s heroine becomes her own entity and less of the allegory the abstract name evokes. By the time she grows into a young woman I no longer recognized myself in her new pursuits but I liked her just the same. We could be friends, Little Miss So and So and me, though I don’t share her fervor for sports and I’m not a lesbian.

The last two lines of Chris’s biography in Not For Sale are,

“She is a member of the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition and completing her MFA in Writing from Minnesota State University. Christine is a survivor of incest and a racist prostitution and pornography ring.”

Knowing some pieces of Stark’s past inadvertently made reading a puzzle in which I tried to sort the facts of her life from the fictions of the story. It’s a pointless game and a little unfair to writers who necessarily draw upon what they know to create stories of unreal people. Stark took a formless, nameless girl called Little Miss So and So and fused the tragedy of her lived facts into a useful fiction. Women who can do this, who can write the indescribable violations of girls in authentic words that resonate with survivors, are treasures to feminism and womenkind.

There are more books inside Ms. Christine Stark, more people’s stories to tell. I look forward to meeting them and the pieces of myself I’ll see in them.

Samantha Berg is National Coordinator for Stop Porn Culture and founder of www.Genderberg.com, an anti-prostitution activist community since 2005.