DUDE SPOTTED AT OCCUPY PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
When confronted (I took his picture and called him a fuckhead with all the venom I could muster), dude says, “Hey, you are being violent to me!!!” Poor little man attacked by nasty feminists for not doing anything at all! He valiantly tried to defend himself saying that his father bought him the t-shirt from Thailand! And the t-shirt WAS NOT VIOLENT in the slightest. Not like us nasty, mean feminists.
Misogyny? I’m loving it! Are you?
This is a speech I gave at Reclaim the Night Perth, 28th October 2011.
Women are a colonised people. Under male supremacy, our original selves are forcibly buried and we are reshaped, our Selves conditioned for use and abuse by the men who occupy us. And this is a truly encompassing occupation. They not only occupy our time and energy, they infiltrate and invade, they alter what it is we believe about ourselves, they construct our identities from birth into being for them.
Under male supremacy, rape and sexual violence is the fabric of the culture in which we live. Women’s purpose is shaped according to what men value about us. We are valued in accordance with our fuckability, our submissiveness, our conformity to their value system which posits women as whores. We are vulnerable, we are penetrable, we are for use and abuse, we are colonised and we are for men.
Men construct the world around this value system. They buy and sell women and girls as sex and call it prostitution. They create degraded images of women being hurt and fucked and raped and call it pornography. Women and girls survive this occupation. We see ourselves starving and trussed up in shop windows, on the sides of buses, on newsstands and in the grocery store. And we survive this. We see little girls wearing Playboy bracelets, young women and girls being branded by the sex industry, stamped as whores, stamped as being owned. And we are still surviving this.
Tonight we are reclaiming more than the night. We are reclaiming ourselves. We are saying, loudly and clearly, “no woman is a whore”. And we are standing with every woman who has been beaten, every woman who has been raped and we are reclaiming ourselves. Men have shaped our realities for far too long, it is time we take back what is ours.
see
that no matter what you have done
i am still here.
and it has made me dangerous, and wise.
and brother,
you cannot whore, perfume, and suppress me anymore.
i have my own business in this skin
and on this planet.
Gail Murray
I’ve spent the day watching youtube vids and researching the situations of the Family Courts in Australia. I don’t think that I could write anything coherent on the subject… it is just too horrific and disturbing. I’ll let you watch the evidence yourselves.
I saw the real ‘Beth’ speak at a protest in Perth about a year ago. Her story will haunt me always.
We just need to look after these children. This is our duty. It’s my moral obligation as a mother and I believe it is the community’s obligation to start speaking up against this. Kids don’t need to die. Parents don’t need to suicide. This does not need to happen. But the courts need to change the way they’re hearing us. They don’t need to hear hysterical. They need to hear women who are screaming for help. Please help us.
I don’t even know why I’m telling you this again. I mean I’ve told so many people… I’ve told this 1000 times but no one seems to listen to what I have to say… I mean, really listen to what I have to say.
I went to the authoritative bodies that I thought could help my son… who all believed me and they believed my son. But when we got to the Family Law Court I was told that they were under-qualified to give evidence… When we went to the law courts no evidence of my son was listened to… I wasn’t listened to. I was told I was a pathological liar, and a lunatic, for believing my son. All the bodies that are in place to help children and help people in my situation were completely disregarded.
…and we were safe for about 3 months. Then the Federal Police came and they took her and they said… “oh, you’ll get her back in about a month”. That was 10 years ago. They’ve said I’m obsessive and compulsive. I keep writing reports. I keep trying to plead with them and give them evidence and they ignore everything. She’s now self-harming and has been for a long time. And since the age of 6 she’s been sexually abused by her step brother in the presence of her father… that’s family protection in Australia.
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.*
At the moment Australia is a little bit upset because yet another football team has been going around gang raping women. They are calling this ‘event’ (as if it only happened one time) a ‘sex scandal’ (as if sex had anything to do with it, unless sex is rape, which, you know, a case could be made for that point). In any case the women who are being raped and seriously harmed by the violence of these men are being sidelined. It is the reputation of the club/player/institution that is being tarnished. It is the sad ruination of a career, the mussing up of a happy family (yeah, like the wife and kids aren’t getting raped as well), etc, etc. My heart bleeds.
What I don’t get is why this is ‘shocking’ news. Men rape women. The more power a man has access to, the more women he has access to rape. Men gang rape women. They coerce, intimidate and force women into sexual submission. Football players are men. Football players have access to a lot of power and hence a lot of women. Football players, like all men, are powerfully attracted to other football players. They see women as their inferiors. As women could never be seen as, or treated as equals, these men primarily bond with each other and their homoerotic games are obvious to anyone who has eyes. Football is just a socially approved way that men show off their love for one another. Gang rape is the sexual extension of men’s homoerotic desire for one another.
So footie players gang-rape teenage girls, well duh!! Of course they do. No one is surprised that they do, in fact they are expected to do so. How else can they express their homosexual desires for each other? How else can they prove their manliness to their team-mates?
Last weekend I flew from Perth to Sydney. It was a 4 and a half hour flight. As I was getting on the plane I noticed a bunch of hulking brutes, all wearing identical t-shirts, standing in the queue to board the flight. From their appearance, I guessed they were a football team. I couldn’t believe the unluck of the situation. The grotesque men had porn magazines stuffed under their arms. Disgusting creatures. I was so worried when boarding that flight. I dreaded that I would be seated next to or near the fuckers and I had no idea how I could deal with that situation. Four and a half hours sitting near a bunch of serial gang rapists.
Thankfully, though I was seated near the gross, disgusting, misshapen creatures, they must have been tired, or too busy group masturbating into their porn mags to make much noise. But the situation really pissed me off. Surely women should have the right to board a plane that does not contain probable rapists. Why do I have to be assaulted by the presence of rapist men, who are blatantly affirming their exulted status as rapists, by carrying around pornographic magazines? This is fucked up, women.
I think there is a very simple solution to the ‘problem’ of the team sport of gang-raping that is so popular as a form of gay male bonding between football players. Mandatory castration of all men who play football and all men who watch football. This would be a quick and easy solution. The violent, woman-hating ‘sport’ will disappear overnight and women will be a little bit safer in this fucked up and dangerous world, full of fucked up and seriously dangerous men.
Football would not exist in a world where women are free and liberated. Nor would the gang rape of teenage girls. Goddess, how I wish, hope, rant, plead and pray for such a world. To all of the many, many women and girls out there who have been raped by football players and their fans, I love you. Thank you for speaking out, for surviving. I hold you in my heart. Your courage is immeasurable. Don’t give up. There are many, many women out here who believe you, who respect you. You are not nothing. You will never be nothing. They are the ones who are nothing.
So I’m reading Woman and Nature and it was very weird reading this particular section. I started writing something about two years ago that I intended to be a novella but never finished it. It was tentatively called Caves. And this section of Woman and Nature is just so, so similar to this piece of writing it is freaky.
The following is from Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature:
Passage
Her Journey
Through the Labyrinth
to the Cave Where
She Has Her VisionThe Cave
The shape of a cave, we say, or the shape of a labyrinth. The way we came here was dark. Space seemed to close in on us. We thought we could not move forward. We had to shed our clothes. We had to leave all that we brought with us. And when finally we moved through the narrow opening, our feet reached for ledges, under was an abyss, a cavern stretching farther than we could see. Our voices echoed off the walls. We were afraid to speak. This darkness led to more darkness, until darkness leading to darkness was all we knew.
The shape of this cave, our bodies, this darkness. This darkness which sits so close to us we cannot see, so close that we move away in fear. We turn into ourselves. But here we find the same darkness, we find we are shaped around emptiness, that we are a void we do not know.
The shape of a cave, this emptiness we seek out like water. The void that we are. That we wash into as sleep washes over us, and we are blanketed in darkness. We see nothing. We are in the centre of our ignorance. Nothingness spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we did not know existed. With our hands, we begin to trace faint images etched into the walls. And now beneath those images we can see the gleam of older images. And these peel back to reveal the older still. The past, the dead, once breathing, the forgotten, the secret, the buried, the once blood and bone, the vanished, shimmering now like an answer from these walls, bright an red. Drawn by the one who came before. An before her. And before. Back to the beginning. To the one who first swam from the mouth of this cave. And now we know all that she knew, see the newness of her vision. What we did not know existed but saw as children, our whole lives drawn here, image over image, past time, beyond space.
The shape of a cave, the bud, the chrysalis, the shell, what new form we seek in this darkness, our hands feeling these walls, here wet, here damp, here crumbling away; our hands searching for signs in this rock, certain now in this darkness, what we seek is here, warm and covered with water, we sweat in this effort, piercing the darkness, laying our skin on the cool stone, tracing the new image over the old, etching these lines which become clear to us now, as what we have drawn here gleams back at us from the walls of the cave, telling us what is, now, and who we have become.
This round cavern, motion turned back on itself, the follower becomes the followed, moon in the sky, the edge becoming the centre, what is buried emerges, light dying over the water, what is unearthed is stunning, the one we are seeking, turning with the ways of the earth, is ourselves.
This cave, the shape to which each returns, where image after image will be revealed, and painted over, painted over and revealed, until we are bone. Where we touch the ones who came before and see their visions, where we leave our mark, where, terrified, we give up ourselves and weep, and taken over by this darkness, are overwhelmed by what we feel: where we are pushed to the edge of existence, to the source which sounds like a wave inside us, to the path of the water which feeds us all.
The way of the water we follow, which has made this space, and hollowed the earth here, because the shape of this cave is a history.
My piece of writing. Keep in mind that it is unfinished.
***
This cave could not abide by linear time; being cyclical in existence, existing in circular realities. The cave had no voice, no hands, no corporeal presence. This cave which is more than memory or myth; both less and more than real. Formed by the infinite power of story and will.
Of course, she is fenced off by their borders and their notions of nation. Territorial pissings. She both is and is not terra. She defies their nullius; she is the land that claims them. What fool is man.
Because she can exist outside their power. Because she has her own power and it stretches on, out of control. Wilder than the wilderness that she calls home. In raw and unbridled passion, in the wilderness of our minds.
She calls us. In the day and in the night, there are those of us that find her. Hidden in the deepest depths, those of our minds. And quietly, quietly she is seeking.
In the mist the last one arrived. Draped in the underwater clouds of fog. Beguiling sense. And in confusion. This was the last of her. She had no strength, she had much strength. She sank into the fog.
A densely coded oblivion.
These were the landscapes in her imagination. Here. In this silence. She couldn’t exist within the depthlessness of their space. She took the dive. She had faith that time existed further from their borders and their safety edges. If there was a fence, man-made or god invoked, she would climb it. Over and beyond. So far she had not stopped existing.
Only to their eyes. Only to theirs. But they couldn’t help noticing.
She pissed on their consecrated ground. She believed this was a spiritual act.
And this was a type of resistance. She didn’t break or crash, she passed through. A type of energy, greater than any kind of force that she alone was capable of.
Deep in the intimate regions. They call this regional because they have not yet destroyed it. She walked. She had discovered what it was that they called depth. It wasn’t enough. How could it be when she was walking underneath into a world that was older than their oldest thought? These trees held all the answers.
Deep in the intimate regions. She could forgive their transgressions, she would forget. For it was beauty that she sought. Here. It was her own beauty that she sought. Here.
Once they could have taught her to forget. Forget herself. Lose, lost, dizzy from they way they spun and spun and spun. A beautiful network of lies. They had trapped her once. Into this. And Oh Yes It Hurt. Like fuck. Like fuck.
She had heard all of their stories, she had listened to their wisdom. And she had known she was mad. Right from the beginning. Because the harder she studied their words. The harder she focused on hearing, seeing, living the way they told her to, and there was no other way. And in a sense they were right. There is no other way for them. But for her?
Sure. She could see through them. Straight through them. They were nothing in the end. And so she reached out and stretched out. Finding her madness. Another world. And it had always existed. Right in front of them. Right behind them. Right all around them. And they knew. And they didn’t know. Who was it that they were fighting?
She realised. We are shadows to them. Negative space. But the truth of our existence lies within this hidden cave. Dangerous to enter. Dangerous to whom?
She was once a great believer in Chaos but now she could listen and discern harmony, now she could look and see tapestry. And these were patterns of her making, held in her own hands. Their Chaos was petty in comparison. Their Chaos was nothing. Not even negative space. For it does not serve to shape.
And so she passed into the cave. Through the ages, through the years, and down, down into unconditional depths. No return from this.
It was easy. To flip a leg over the railing. To pause a second on the edge. To fall, with sense, onto her feet.
Because she did not own this land. The land owned her. And she could breathe and live and love with it. Like everything the attachment was cyclical and circular. Loving, as she did. This land that held her existed in the same space as the land that held her mothers, existed in the same space that held her daughters. This land that held her existed in the same space as the land that held her sisters and their arms stretched out and their arms reached out. This land; earth, sky and water. Arms that reached, and encircled.
Because this was the depth she had been looking for.
The cavern opened before her; she was pulled before its mysterious depth, drawn in by the fullness of the vacuity. Tapestry, harmony. Silk and salt, earth and rock, patterning palms. She could believe in this. She paused before the entrance, touching her fingers to the lips of the cave, turning her eyes to the darkness accentuated in the midst of the fog.
Red rock shot through with lines of coal and lime streaks, moisture dripping coolly down its sides making the floors slippery with moss.
She was sure of her imagination as the rock pulsed like blood-life beneath her palm. She was sure of her imagination as the moss layered the cave in skin softness as she pressed it to her cheek.
Again, she turned her eyes towards the cave; her eyes creating shapes, images of women forming and crowding the edges of her vision.
Deep and dark, different hues of black and midnight blue, taking the shape of stories long forgotten. And songs of ancient peoples, pulsating rhythmically through the stone and ore. Forward, like the pull of a river, like the pull of a storm, forward until she had no sense of time or space and there was only darkness.
Without fear, without conscious thought, she expanded her arms, pulling the cave into herself, filling herself with its memory. And she was dancing, dancing in the cave with magics all around, undulating with the tide of distant pasts and wary futures, bleeding with the blood of many women.
As she surrendered or was taken up by the passion of place, sensation on the edge of reason, belief on the edge of doubt. There were many rooms of the cave and as she passed by they awakened, brought to life by the presence of a soul who could hear them.
Each room sang its own song, kept its own time and she danced her way into story until she was overtaken by dream. She slept as she danced, danced as she slept, breathing the life of the rock, breathing in rhythm and rhyme, sleeping to the memory and wakening to song.
Here she comes.
***
Weird how similar they are. Woman and Nature was published in 1978, but I only read it recently.
Vandana Shiva is quite simply an incredible woman. Her life and her work are supremely inspirational. Her words have moved me, displaced me and changed my mind. Very, very few things that I read actually cause me to stop and look at the world from a completely different angle. Her work and her words are world-changing and mind-altering.
I read Ecofeminism (co-written with Maria Mies, another amazing eco-feminist) about a year ago and was just stunned by this woman, by the clarity of her thoughts and her insights. This woman is SMART. She cuts right clear down to the quick and turns the whole world and its crapitalist, male supremacist bullshit on its head.
Dams, mines, energy plants, military bases – these are the temples of the new religion called ‘development’, a religion that provides the rationale for the modernizing state, its bureaucracies and technocracies. What is sacrificed at the alter of this religion is nature’s life and people’s life. The sacraments of development are made of the ruins and desecration of other sacreds, especially sacred soils. They are based on the dismantling of society and community, on the uprooting of people and cultures. Since soil is the sacred mother, the womb of life in nature and society, its inviolability has been the organizing principle for societies which ‘development’ has declared backward and primitive. But these people are our contemporaries. They differ from us not in belonging to a bygone age but in having a different concept of what is sacred, what must be preserved. The sacred is the bond that connects the part to the whole. The sanctity of the soil must be sustained, limits must be set on human action. From the point of view of the managers of development, the high priests of the new religion, sacred bonds with the soil are impediments and hindrances to be shifted and sacrificed. Because people who hold the soil as sacred will not voluntarily allow themselves to be uprooted, ‘development’ requires a police state and terrorist tactics to wrench them away from their homes and homelands, and consign them as ecological and cultural refugees into the wasteland of industrial society. Bullets, as well as bulldozers, are often necessary to execute the development project.
In India, the magnitude of this sacrifice is only now becoming evident. Victims of progress have, of course, experienced their own uprooting and have resisted it. But both the victims and the state perceived each sacrifice as a small one for the larger ‘national interest’. Over 40 years of planned development, the planned destruction of nature and society no longer appears negligible; and the larger ‘national interest’ turns out to be embodied in an elite minority without roots. Fifteen million people have been uprooted from their homelands in India during the past four development decades. They and their links with the soil, have been sacrificed to accommodated mines, dams, factories, and wildlife parks.
‘Development’ has meant the ecological and cultural rupture of bonds with nature, and within society, it has meant the transformation of organic communities into groups of uprooted and alienated individuals searching for abstract identities.
Colonialism and capitalism transformed land and soil from being a source of life and a commons from which people draw sustenance, into private property to be bought and sold and conquered; development continued colonialism’s unfinished task. It transformed man from the role of guest to predator. In a sacred space, one can only be a guest, one cannot own it. This attitude to the soil and earth as a sacrilized home, not private property, is characteristic of most Third World societies.
In indigenous communities, individuals have no property rights, instead, the entire tribe is the trustee of the land it occupies, and the community or tribe includes not only the currently living members but also the ancestors and future generations.
Development has converted soil from sacred mother into disposable object – to be ravaged for minerals that lie below, or drowned beneath gigantic reservoirs. The soil’s children, too, have been made disposable: mines and dams leave behind wastelands and uprooted people. The desacrilization of the soil as sacred space was an essential part of colonialism then and of development now.
In effect, the process of development leads to turning away from the soil as a source of meaning and survival, and turning to the state and its resources for both. The destruction of organic links with the soil also leads to the destruction of organic links within society. Diverse communities, co-operating with each other and the land become different communities competing with each other for the conquest of the land. The homogenization processes of development do not fully eliminate differences. These persist, not in an integrating context of plurality, but in the fragmenting context of homogenization. Positive pluralities give way to negative dualities, each in competion with every ‘other’, contesting the scarce resources that define economic and political power. The project of development is propounded as a source of growth and abundance. Yet by destroying the abundance that comes from the soil and replacing it by the resources of the state, new scarcities and new conflicts for scarce resources are created. Scarcity, not abundance, characterizes situations where nothing is sacred and everything has a price.
Vandana mentions the Chipko women’s movement in this vid. You can find out more about them here.
Awe-inspiring, radical, charismatic, lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys has written a new book called The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. It looks like it will be a really eye-opening and well-researched book (as are all books written by Sheila Jeffreys). Radio National interviewed Sheila about the book. You can find the interview here Go listen. Sheila is awesome!
Caroline Norma in response to this article by Helen Razer.
Lessons in internet pornography Helen Razer is lucky she doesn’t live in China. The Chinese government last week shut down 244 pornography sites in a rolling campaign that it declares will be ‘no flash in the pan’. The Chinese government has made a bold public commitment to follow though on a promise to monitor and suppress the distribution of pornography, not just through the internet, but also via ‘mobile phone games, online novels and radio programs’ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28752383/).
How would Razer fare as a Chinese woman living under a government that restricts the ability of its citizens to see pictures of men sexually penetrating women in a thousand different ways, using a thousand different implements? Razer is already worried that the Rudd government’s plan to suppress the distribution of child pornography will interfere with her pornography consumption. Imagine if Australia followed China’s lead and even suppressed pornography made out of women. Imagine the constraints that this would impose on Razer’s life!
Read the whole article on the STOP Australia blog. It is totally worth the read.
Just read part of the Season 8 Buffy comic in the library today and I am still dry retching. EWWWWWWWWW!!!!!
EWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!
EWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!
Repeat after me kiddies: “Pornography is not fracking empowering.”
Lesbian porn for male gratification is fucking sick. Besides DYKES DO NOT LOOK LIKE THIS JOSS WHEDON YOU PERVERT!!!!
Showing teenage girls in their underwear is fucked in the head. YOU ARE A CHILD PORNOGRAPHER, JOSS!!!!
Just needed to get that off my chest.
You are currently browsing the archives for the male terrorism category.
Radfem Hub
Gorgon Poisons 