Patriarchal Sisters

As I participate in more feminist discourse and communities, I find myself challenged to describe what sisterhood means.

Making actual change is difficult. Talking big within your safe in group is easy. Those risk willing people weren’t interested in taking purposeful risks. Plenty of people hack. Few people protest. (Aria Plus Cat)

I know that sisterhood means a real active change that challenges institutional power, but also I know that it means loving women as we grow and fail too. 

But how do we motivate each other to do better without stagnating? While moving beyond seeing one another as only valuable as productive laborers? How do we stand with our younger learning sisters when they do wrong? Without condoning their bad behavior? What sort of relationship does sisterhood convey between lesbians and heterosexual women, black and white women? How can we have a relationship when we have participated in our dividedness? How do we recognize the differences while claiming same-ness?

Certainly, I don't have an answer to this question. I doubt that there's one right answer to this question. I pose it to challenge myself to try to answer it and to hope that maybe this internal conversation can be an opening to active discussion.

First let's look at a patriarchal definition of sisterhood, how the patriarchy has created a dark reversal of a gynocentric relationship between women.

Part of this active discussion is going to be criticism. I am always amazed at the women who claim to be political, but cannot take criticism of their actions. Being honest - pointing out an error - is seen as cruelty. We have to recognize how we have been sensitized as women, to believe in our incompetent fragility and also our need to be perfect to deserve even the smallest degree of respect. We are going to look hard at our community, even at how we feel about ourselves and each other.

To insist that women challenge their own fear of effectiveness and their own guilt for behaving effectively, to insist that we both behave honestly and responsibly and risk hurting others' feelings (which is hardly the worst thing in the world) is emphatically to disobey the Feminine Imperative. It's selfish. It isn't sisterly. It isn't "nice."

But it is, I'm beginning to suspect, the feminist act. (Power and Helplessness via Feminist Reprise)

Sisterhood seems to be here defined as a patriarchal sisterhood. The patriarchal sister is weak, forgiving, cringing. She lets people take advantage of her. She feels guilt. She's fearful of her crippled strength and others who are stronger than her. "Daddy's Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy, and thereafter, other men, against a background of fear (`respect') and is not only unable to see the empty shell behind the facade, but accepts the male definition of himself as superior, as a female, and of herself, as inferior, as a male, which, thanks to Daddy, she really is." Perhaps patriarchal sisterhood is a bit like matrophobia:

Consider, for example, the instilled fear of becoming like one's mother (matrophobia). Repeatedly we find daughters who repudiate the particular kind of victimization they see in their mothers' lives, only to live and die out an apparently opposite but really only slightly variant form of the same dis-ease (for example, the life of a Cosmo Girl as opposed to that of a staid suburban housewife). (Daly, Gyn/ecology)

The patriarchal sisterphobia would be the pitting of Cosmo girl against her older sister housewife, the city sisters against each other in the workplace, the working sister her younger dependent sister. "A vivid and accurate image of the way in which women have been coerced into “participating” in the phallocratic processions" can include the way sisters have competed against each other to be more hobbled. Daly focuses on the mother who mutilates her daughter's feet, but patriarchal sisters participate in this process too.

In the old stories of Cinderella, the mother mutilates both her daughters but at the same time, the daughters compete against each other for both her attention and the male attention of the Prince. This sister against sister portion of the story is revived in the production of Into the Woods.  This intra-sister violence may also be shown again in the Disney production of Cinderella.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Cinderella's sisters from the movie production of Into the Woods[/caption]

The prince tried the slipper on the eldest stepsister. The sister was advised by her mother to cut off her toes in order to fit the slipper. While riding with the stepsister, the two doves from Heaven told the Prince that blood dripped from her foot. Appalled by her treachery, he went back again and tried the slipper on the other stepsister. She cut off part of her heel in order to get her foot in the slipper, and again the prince was fooled. While riding with her to the king's castle, the doves alerted him again about the blood on her foot. He came back to inquire about another girl. As Cinderella was walking down the aisle with her stepsisters as her bridesmaids, (they had hoped to worm their way into her favour), the doves from Heaven flew down and struck the two stepsisters' eyes, striking the remaining eyes of the two evil sisters blind, a punishment they had to endure for the rest of their lives. (via Wikipedia)

In the story we see the inter generational violence: Mother to daughter. We also see the intra generational violence: Sister to sister, back and forth. 

The story recognizes that the violence occurs as the women fight for the Prince's attention and the privileges that come with it. The scrambling conniving step sisters are a conveyed as clear evil force. But the step sisters could be portrayed as victims too. Cinderella and the step sisters have been abused and hurt by the step mother, but that is totally erased. The sisters cannot work together or bond over their shared experience.

Nor can the women, sisters and mothers, work together to escape the (patriarchal) cycle of abuse: Cinderella strikes the sisters blind. Cinderella is a good patriarchal daughter in that she remains an order removed from the doves of heaven, but her distorted wish for violence that drives the retribution. In other stories, Cinderella's husband binds the stepmother in hot iron shoes as a wedding gift to his new wife. Cinderella's marriage begins with the mother "dancing" to death as the hot metal burns her feet. Cinderella remains dependent, now on the prince, rather than her step mother or father. 

This same sisterly relationship as competitive and dependent can be continued in feminist spaces, between feminist women. Systems of dominance and relationships of dominance abound in patriarchal societies, even between women.

Since the middle-class friends [...] were never explicit that what made them uncomfortable with me was not what I said but that I could say it, what I got in return was abuse. Just as my long-ago class-privileged friend had explained to me, when people are forbidden a right to honest anger and the apology that could be demanded from one who has injured them, all that is left to express is cruelty; all that is left to reach for from the other person is a reaction—any reaction—but preferably one that hurts as much as the wounded party now feels hurt. ( The Lesbian Revolution and the 50 Minute hour)

The same issues are used to keep out lesbian feminists from mainstream feminist spaces:

There is a disgusting history of women shutting out the (lesbian) hysteric woman from feminist discourse. The woman who talks a little too loudly about hating men is never welcome. The woman who is honest about her anger at rape in her politics is worse still. The lavender menace is at once named, othered, and shut out. (Aria Plus Cat)

Womyn’s centers (and bookstores and restaurants and buildings) were effectively closed to separatist and other radical lesbians by their switch from revolutionary forums to social reform, and later still to a focus on personal growth. Relationships between lesbians were similarly undermined [by] privileged womyn ( The Lesbian Revolution and the 50 Minute hour)

But what is feminist sisterhood?

Those who live in the tradition of the Furies refuse to be tricked into setting aside our anger at this primordial mutilation, which is the ontological separation of mother from daughter, of daughter from mother, of sister from sister. Women choosing Hag-ocracy refuse to teach divine science to the kings of the earth, to initiate them into our mysteries. Hag-ocracy is the time/space of those who maintain a growing creative fury at this primal injustice (Mary Daly, Gyn/ecology)

I'll try to tackle the question in more depth. But we're going to have to unweave the patriarchal reversal.

Nerdiness: I am a monster

I am a monster you don't have to imagine.

I don't generally make it my business to engage with men on feminist issues. It's not my responsibility to teach every college male - if he wants me to tutor him in human decency he can hit up my paypal (kresh426@mit.edu) as easily as he pays MITPAY. In this post, I refer and respond to several sources mainly because I felt that Laurie Penny's response while well written, constructive, and engaging was not where I wanted to leave the discussion.

But I'm getting real tired of these whining young men in STEM fields. Of the grown male authors who refer to nerdy women and girls as an underutilized resource. Of the entitled men who frighten children with pornography of fictional ponies. All of their anger seems to be based on the fact they didn't 'get some' in high school and/or college. To quote a fictional lesbian:

Jenny: Oh, fuck off, Mark. It's not my job to make you a better man and I don't give a shit if I've made you a better man. It's not a fucking woman's job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve. (The L Word)

Becoming us, dating us, consuming us is not the answer to your problems. 

We are our own unconquerable people.

Yet another STEM man has decided to rationalize his support of a known sexual abuser by describing the bullying he experienced as a white heterosexual male nerd.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. (comment 171)

I’ve always felt a special kinship with gays and lesbians, precisely because the sense of having to hide from the world, of being hissed at for a sexual makeup that you never chose, is one that I can relate to on a visceral level. (another of his post)

First off: How entitled to you have to be to want to steal my skin, my identity, my sexuality for yourself? You do not have any kinship with me or the LGB people. You have married your wife! It is legal for you to marry your wife! You will not be fired from your job because you are married to your wife or express your heterosexuality! If I wish to enter an Boston marriage with a woman, I will have to very carefully choose where I live and work. I would have only been able to do so since Oct 16, 2014 in my home state of Virginia with 43% of polled people being opposed to this ability. There is no federal protection against firing LGB people. You have literally no visceral kinship with us; you are not us. You don't get to feel a kinship our blood and sweat, our bodies beaten or dead. Nor do you express "kinship" with lesbian women by linking to an article that addresses sexist work place discrimination by countering with the ability of heterosexual women to get responses from men on a dating website. How do you manage to call lesbians your kin and also erase lesbians? STOP. Stop stealing us, consuming our pain from your very very safe place as a grown up.

Secondly: I live at the intersection of your fantasies: I was and am a woman, asexual. I was a geek.

In middle and high school I was ruthlessly teased for those precise reasons. For so very many things more.

For being mulatto - for my wide nose, my frizzy curly hair, my just-too-southern-black accent. For being short. For my asthma. For wearing glasses. For being too bookish. For getting good grades. For being quiet.

I was always the Before of the Princess Diaries, simultaneously invisible and subject to ridicule. The very qualities that he imagines as freeing him to devote himself to his academics created a barrier so onerous, socially and academically, I fell behind my academics and became suicidally depressed. To the point I had to go to a therapeutic home with attached school for some time.  I don't mean to discount what this man experienced in his boyhood or to compare traumas. What I mean to point out is that my identity is not a fantasy or an escape. Quite the opposite. Bullying due to my intersectional identity negatively affected my academic focus and performance.

Inhabiting my positionality is not a release from fear but rather to live in the intersection of different fears. 

Finally, his imagining is based on the fact that he refuses actually know us. We do already exist. We do document and discuss our experiences with discrimination and bullying. We don't have to be imagined by a man. It seems impossible to me that a grown educated man be unaware that there are black women who like science. Or non-het women who like comics, lesbians as the heroines of comics. He chooses not know our lived experiences with layered discrimination. He refers to his (mis)reading of white radfem texts to establish his authority and validate his refusal to listen to other voices, including women of color and lesbian women.

Here is another radical feminist and a woman of color: bell hooks

They are quick to tell me I am different, not like the "real" feminists who hate men, who are angry. I assure them I am as real and as radical a feminist as one can be, and if they dare to come any closer to feminism they will see it is not how they have imagined it. (via bell hooks, feminism is for everybody)

She describes his familiar tacts of purposeful misidentification or refusal of identity. To continue to imagine us, he must refuse to respect our reality, our history. She recognizes that these are techniques of dismissal.

Much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my 'male privilege' — my privilege! — is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience (comment 171 via article)

These are the perspectives of my geeky friends, my intimate experiences, my academic training.

I knew all the other "imaginary" nerds: the gay geeks, the black nerds, the poor nerds, the young girl geeks. I knew the girl who relied on the public library for her books and generously loaned those books to kids who couldn't get to the library. I knew the girls who longed to be noticed, appreciated, by those nerdy boys who mocked us, tested our knowledge, discounted our thoughts. I knew too the boys who wanted to be known by other boys, who wrongly thought those white het male geeks would be a little less racist, a little less homophobic, a little less classist. I knew the heated discussion of black music between AfroSamurai, Boondocks, and Samurai Champloo. I knew the feminine discounted knowledge: the shojo manga with frilly titles and the Tamora Pierce that wasn't real fantasy.

Monstrous words, dripping frogs not pearls.

So what terms do we engage with these men on? How do we respond to our dismissal? How do we escape the bullying and discrimination?

Even when we try to escape to the intellectual world, we find sex or race or class based discrimination in professional fields. We can never forget or move on from the middle school bullying because we are not part of the STEM communities that validate and empower each other based on that shared experience. Nor do we share 'that' het white male experience of nerdiness bullying. Again, women and minorities face an intersection of different fears.

Unlike Aaronson, I was also female, so when I tried to pull myself out of that hell into a life of the mind, I found sexism standing in my way. I am still punished every day by men who believe that I do not deserve my work as a writer and scholar. Some escape it's turned out to be. (via article)

Even when we describe our perspectives in the "right" ways we are dismissed.

He refuses to confront the truth of what we live whether narrative or rhetorical, quantitative or qualitative. Presumably he doesn't accept the racism and sexism described in AYA; maybe that's not a real comic book or a real description of lacking privilege. As he admits, he "read many studies and task force reports about gender bias" so he has been faced with empirical evidence too.

Harassment of any kind is not acceptable behavior at MIT; it is inconsistent with the commitment to excellence that characterizes MIT's activities. [...] The Institute is committed under this policy to stopping harassment and associated retaliatory behavior. All MIT supervisors have a responsibility to act to stop harassment in the areas under their supervision (MIT policy on sexual harassment)

Again this 97% feminist ally is a man who is choosing to support a known abuser, who wants to return a venue to a known sexual abuser despite MIT's clear policy on no tolerance for sexual harassment. Let's not forget: this whole thing started because he wants to keep up the lectures of a known male sexual abuser. He wants the details of the harassment public, regardless of the victim's needs and wants - even if she's (or any other abused women) embarrassed. To him, the "wrong message about MIT's values" is to enforce the policy of no tolerance for sexual harassment. He refuses to listen to women's experiences or research. The last 3% are apparently the points that actually matter, convert to action. Penny, you need to address this blatant sexism in your feminist response! 

Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes. So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong. (bell hooks, feminism is for everybody)

Of course some pissant will come along to tell women speaking of work discrimination that we should be grateful that men might just fuck us:

This comes across so strongly as “my suffering is worse than your suffering” spiel, so much so that I’m tempted to argue it and review a bunch of experiments like how even the least attractive women on dating sites get far more interest than men. Or how women asking random people for sex on the street get accepted more than two-thirds of the time, but men trying the same get zero percent. Or how the same study shows that the women who get declined get declined politely, while the men are treated with disgust and contempt. (via said pissant)

Where is is the 97% of his agreement to call this pissant out? No, he commend and links to them.

It seems to me we are going to be dismissed no matter what, whether we have lived experience, detailed studies, or institutional policy on our side. These male nerds are not going to assist us in ending the bullying, abuse, and discrimination because they insist it never happened even as they platform sexual abusers.

Let's reverse the patriarchal reversal: What are we to ask him?

Monsters who tear down houses

There are a lot of young men out there - I suspect even now - who sometimes wish they'd been born when things were a bit easier, when the balance of male versus female sexual shame was tilted more sharply by the formal rituals of patriarchy, when men could just take or be assigned what they wanted, as long as they were also white and straight.

There are a lot of older men out there who long for that real or imagined world more openly, and without any of Aaronson's nuance and compassion. I would challenge men to analyse that longing, to see it for what it is. And then to resist it. You are smarter and better than that. (via article)

What exactly is nuanced about wanting male power back? What exactly is compassionate about wanting to revert to assigning women as property, chattel, and objects? What does it say about a person that they are well adapted to the contractual and ritualized exchange of women as property-objects? What does that predict about how they approach their relationships? Why does he resist anti-rape campaigns so adamantly? What about his behavior with women makes him fear accusations of sexual abuse? Why do we as women keep pretending that there are not class interests at stake here?

Whose passion is validated? Male passion, specifically male violent fantasies. She ignores the real truth in the fantasy, a dangerous violence in male power fantasy. This man isn't stupid. He's knowingly choosing to engage in this fantasy just as he is knowingly recounting it as a ploy for sympathy. He is aware of the power imbalance in his fantasy; that female vulnerability is precisely what's appealing to him. The patriarchy is a power hierarchy designed to be beneficial to men; smart men came up with it to protect their class interests.  You can't extend compassion to someone who wants you back in chains.

In case you'd rather deal in fantasy, for a geeky parallel: Why do men like slave!Leia so much more than any other incarnation of Leia? More than normal!Leia or senator!Leia or warrior!Leia or pilot!Leia? Why do we allow men to sexually fantasize about a strong young woman when she is at her most silent and vulnerable? What does it say about male nerd culture that men want to 'remember' back to the time when she was in chains and sexually available against her will?

Why do we excuse these monstrous fantasies? Why do we validate them? Why don't we admit the truth - these men are the same slime slugs as any male who fantasies about taking away women's rights and self determination.  Let's do what Leia did.

• Kill the male fantasy by taking hold of the very chains.


• Reject it outright as wrong and abusive.


• Build our own revolutionary world.

Self Perception and Male Violence

This post is basically in conversation with this amazing article at Feminist Current on the rhetoric around male victims of violence. All quotes unless otherwise sourced are from that article. I hope that by being in conversation with this article that I can better understand it and share some insights with you.

Women overestimate their own use of violence but underestimate their victimization. Woman normalize, discount, minimize, excuse their partners’ domestic and sexual violence against them. Women find ways to make it their fault.

To be feminine is to be a good victim, at best a willing victim. Refusal to comply with femininity is seen as violent, an abnormal act of defiance. It's a double bind: if we comply with femininity, we are submitting to male violence. If we resist femininity and male violence, men will target us for even more violence as a corrective political control. In this way women are encouraged to underestimate what we suffer through; it is our "natural" place to suffer. Of course, femininity is not our natural place. Women are not natural subjects to male violence. Men have created a system of indoctrination and conditioning young women to accept male violence as natural. The first model for domestic abuse is the abusive father.

The effect of fatherhood on females is to make [women] male -- dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, `respectful' of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half-dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened-out and thoroughly contemptible. Daddy's Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy, and thereafter, other men, against a background of fear (`respect') and is not only unable to see the empty shell behind the facade, but accepts the male definition of himself as superior. (via Solanas' SCUM Manifesto)

Masculinity is about being at the top of the gender hierarchy and maintaining this position through dominance, violence, and intimidation towards women. Males conditioning women to expect and accept male violence keeps these systems alive. Gaslighting techniques are common necrophallic techniques, especially in long term domestic abuse. 

He blames you for the impact of his behavior.
He becomes upset and accusatory when his partner exhibits the predictable effects of chronic mistreatment, and then he adds insult to injury by ridiculing her for feeling hurt by him. If his verbal assaults cause her to lose interest in sex with him, he says, “you must be getting it somewhere else.” (p. 126) (via Is it really ABUSE?)

Interacting systems normalize male violence, allowing males to describe their own violence as invisible, dismissing their cruelty as inherent and finding resistance a notable aberrant. Remember this beautiful Lierre Keith quote - "Masculinity sexualizes acts of oppression." It is because of this that we can create parallels between all systems of male violence: they rely on the same operating system of metaphors. That legal systems would exacerbate the invisibility of male violence while also displaying and sexualizing the victims becomes obvious.

In contrast, men overestimate their victimization and underestimate their own violence (Dobash et al. 1998). Men are more likely to exaggerate a women’s provocation or violence to make excuses for initiating violence and, where retaliation has occurred, in an attempt to make it appear understandable and reasonable.

Again, men are perpetuating a system in which male violence may be used to "correct" and dissuade female resistance. Refusal to conform to femininity and be available to men is considered provocation for male violence. Even if the woman is a girl; even if the man is a stranger.

Earlier this week a man in a car pulled up next to a 14-year old girl on a street in Florida and offered to pay her $200 to have sex with him. [...] The girl said no. So what does this guy do? He reaches out, drags her, by her hair, into his car, chokes her until she blacks out, tosses her out of the car and then, not done yet, he runs her over several times.  Bystanders watched the entire episode in shock. [...] This was an incident of street harassment taken to extremes. (via huff post)

I relate this example because it demonstrates the entitlement that all men feel they have to all women at any moment. The intersection of the pornification and male entitlement is the extreme violence of this case. Note, also that bystanders did not interfere - men support this violent punishment for refusal; women fear being caught in the extreme correctional violence. Women to are witness to what happens when you attempt to boycott men. Normalized male violence is a form of political control. 

Paul Keene, used the defence of provocation for his killing of Gaby Miron Buchacra. His defence claimed that he was belittled by her intellectual superiority and that he lost control after rowing with her by text over a twelve hour period. That a jury accepted his defence is a further example of how men’s violence is minimized and excused. Not only by men and the women they assault, but by the legal system.

Again, these forms of gas lighting transverse male systems of power in order to make women doubt their own perceptions of male violence. Purposefully, men blind women to the hollowness and cruelty behind the facade of normalcy. They do so with well documented attacks on women's personhood and sense of self.

• He denies what he did.
  A non-abusive partner might argue with you about how you interpret something he did; an abuser denies his actions altogether (p. 128).


• He justifies his hurtful actions or says you “made him do it.”
  Here the abuser is using your behavior as an excuse for his own....He says he’ll stop some form of abuse if you give up something that bothers him, which is usually something you have every right to do (p. 128). (via Is it really ABUSE?)

The right to claim abuse as a mitigating factor in domestic violence homicide cases was vitally important for women like Kiranjit Aluwahlia, Emma Humphreys and Sara Thornton, all of whom had suffered years of violence and abuse at the hands of the men they killed. That such a defence could be used in Paul Keene’s case only illustrates how differently women and men who use violence are treated.

Note again, the difficulties these women are going up against.

• The abuse they faced is erased by the legal system


• The abuse they faced is erased by their abuser


• Their abuser utilizes gas lighting to prevent the movement to self defense


• Women's self defense is seen as abnormal and excessive


• Women's self defense faces higher penalties than the initial abuse


• The gas lighting technique is amplified by male systems of power

A radical feminist perspective, based on an understanding of socially constructed gender roles and differences within the framework of patriarchal society does not mean that all men are violent to women, or that men are genetically pre-disposed to violence. It means the opposite. It means that women and men are socialized and that – within the limits of choice permitted by the social environment – we can choose to be different.

What's Owed - NOTHING

Every time women take time to care for themselves, to foster sisterhood, we are assaulted by pleas for our attention.

Feminists have for years created safe spaces for women, expanded the rights of women, and decried male violence. Women stand forefront to expand the protection for victims of male violence. In improving the lives of women, women allow each other to give more to our communities. Men may even gain some periphery benefits; destroying the toxicity of gender hierarchy would cure many ills for male and female victims of male violence. But our women's work, energy, is our own and hard won at that. 

Consider for example male violence in terms of rape: Women created our definitions of marital rape, statutory rape, date rape, and expand definitions to include more forms of non consensual sex as rape. Women continue to expand these definitions in order to offer protection to victims of male violence. Feminists do this to protect each other from male violence as the threat of rape is a prevalent form of political terror men use over women; women incidentally created a protection for male victims of male rapists.

“There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to improve the conditions in which battered women live,” Meyer argues, “but when putative efforts to just 'make it better' become the end goal, the political vision and motivation to address the real exegesis of male violence becomes sublimated... The political disappears and domestic violence becomes a naturalized part of what appears to be an unchanging or unchangeable social landscape.” (Meyer 2001, p. 23). (via disloyal)

Feminist action is political action; the personal is political. Preventing and penalizing male rapists is part of a coherent political strategy taken on with women's time and energy. Men continue to rape despite women's work. 

When women speak out regarding men raping women, we are told to care about male victims. Of course we already do and provide significant resources to male victims. Biophilic, we give support to all life by existing, by combating the necrophallic, by creating networks of life and growth. We created legal protections, crisis lines, shelters, and support for those battered and abused by men. It is because of our women's work that they have any claim to legal protections and do not face assault for 'buggery/sodomy' - yes, male victims coming forward have been convicted with buggery. And yes, feminists are doing the work of undermining this homophobic violence perpetuated by men and the male justice-penal system.

What this does is conflate rape with consensual relations and conflate the sexual abuse of a child with sex between adults. Ultimately it sends the message that it is the homosexual nature of the act that is offensive/egregious/illegal rather than the rape of a child. (via Feminist Conversation)

Women are already taking on so much to fight against male violence, putting ourselves at risk to protect ourselves. The energy we already give to male victims is never enough. Our critics tell us that feminists must fix the problem of male rapists, that we are not focusing enough on male victims.

This argument/critique relies on a few premises:

• Women must fix the problem of men raping men


• Women must engage with men


• Women have power to engage with and change male systems of violence


• Women, having limited resources, must give those resources to men


• Women must limit the resources we give to women in order to attend to men


• Men are not being called on to act or change their behavior


• Men are currently neutral in regard to male rapists

Laying out these premises, I hope that to a feminist the flaws are obvious. Women are systemically disenfranchised from systems of patriarchal power; women's energy is sapped and the labor-value produced devalued and stolen by men; men are responsible for their own violence. Men value male rapists; masculinity values violence and dominance especially over women; rape culture is pervasive and encouraged in male-only spheres.  It becomes obvious that our critics are seeking to undermine our political power by diverting our energy back to men. Women in no way required to attend to men, clean male messes, or even speak to men. We do not owe them our polite smiles or our spiraling energy. 

When we look closer at our critics we find that male victims reap privileges of their maleness even as they face homophobia. (Remember: lesbians are the victims of sexist homophobia; men are still men.) Really, go read this whole article for the take down on the lies told about male victims. Being the victim of rape is terrible and deserving of sympathy and support. No feminist doubts this. So. Why do critics feel the need to exaggerate and outright lie about male victims?

‘It’s harder for men to report, there’s much more of a taboo for men’

Exactly the opposite:

• men are more – not less – likely to call the police


• men are more likely – not less – to press charges


• men are less likely – not more – to drop charges (Kimmel 2002)

Another way to get round the issue of unrepresentative reporting is to look at who gets killed, dead people don’t get the choice of whether or not to inform the police. UK Homicide records between 2001/2 and 2011/12 (11 years) show that on average 5.7% (296 total) of male homicide victims and 44.2%(1066) of female homicide victims are killed by a partner or ex-partner. Expressed as an average of those killed by a partner or former partner over 11 years, 22% were men, 78% were women.

Note, the domestic homicide figures do not tell us the sex of the perpetrator, nor is the sex of the perpetrator revealed for all other types of homicide. Men are overwhelmingly killed by other men – regardless of the relationship between victim and perpetrator. Women are overwhelmingly killed by men – regardless of the relationship between victim and perpetrator (via feminist current)

I would take this moment to point out another example: the theft of black women's energy in both the civil rights movement for the black vote and the female vote. I hope to write a more extensive post on this to give it the due attention deserved. Black women, and women of color, do not owe men or white women our energy. 

Remember freedom before femininity. Imagine our Amazonian future. Enjoy your vision, visage, victories. Know that loving yourself as a woman - connecting with our history - exploring our witches' strength and creativity - know that this like all women's work is real. You don't have to justify your work or yourself. You have value inherit, not because what you give or give up. That worth is not tied to men.

Anything less than everything from women will never be enough for men. Give them nothing. 

Unpacking & Unwrapping - Justified

I am taking steps to improve my life. It is an extraordinary amount of work. My mental and physical health have received so much love and energy from feminists. I feel such a connection and support from other women and it motivates me to keep going. Part of improving my life is carefully considering the foundational assumptions of the culture - and gender - I live in.

Unpacking your cultivated assumptions is difficult, even painful. You may be giving up a lot of cultural capital and privilege that you've worked hard to gain access to. Imagine the woman who grew up with corsets, dependent on the instrument that smothers her to hold up her back. Slowly, she loosens her corset bindings; she may even need another woman to help her as the lacings are on her back and out of her own sight. She's likely mocked by her peers that used to compliment her small waist. She's told that women need the support and structure of the corset; the argument may even sound convincing as she first begins to use her atrophied back and core muscles. That's what it's like. So I would like to acknowledge the work and labor that goes into this unpacking, unwrapping. 

Some of the damage can't be undone. We can't remove all of our indoctrination and upbringing. The corset can stunt and distort the growth of the ribcage - those bodily effects will remain with the woman even after she gives up the corset's binding. The effect of this indoctrination of gender is permanently embodied. It's slow and painful work to accept the distortions and maiming left behind but also to construct new ways of working and living that allow us to do what needs to be done.

Constantly I am asked what I'm doing whenever I talk about feminist issues, especially those of black women - the onus of burden on the resistor.

• What protests did I attend?


• What articles have I written?


• What classes have I taken?


• What sacrifices have I made?

I refuse to answer those questions. I point to the unpacking I have done and that I encourage other women to do. Unpacking myself, educating myself, and creating my own spaces to do so - this is women's work and women's work is valuable.

Once and for all I will answer these questions.

Every day of my life is a protest because I am a woman of color from the foster care system who is not in prison or homeless. Every day of my life is a protest against white male power, as I use the resources that my male counter parts greedily take for granted and I refuse to give my time and energy to men. Each time I speak with a woman of color, with lesbian, bisexual, and sexual women, with young women, with frightened women, with poor women - each conversation and encouragement is a protest. Each movement away from violence and destruction is a protest of the instability of patriarchal consumption of women and the world we inhabit.

I have written many articles for many classes. I have been recognized for my academic achievements by the standard bearers of patriarchal regard. I stand on my academic achievements at a premiere university as a student of culture, anthropology, archaeology, and art history. I study hard and take my academic work very seriously. I have for several year now been training in the theory and criticism of structures of society. I have tried to focus my studies on revealing the methods by which these systems convey their ideologies and perpetuate themselves, in art and other aspects of material culture.

I have done years of traditional service. I briefly worked for the Public Service Center at my university. I have hosted events with the Office of Minority Education for students in my dorm, focusing as always on the women I lived with. I have hosted female prospective students; I have given tours to female prospective students; I have served as an advisor to male and female students. I have done (and gratefully received) service through the Children's Defense Fund including working in their Freedom Schools in a homeless shelter in D.C. Earlier in high school I was involved in many service activities including four years of continuous service and activism for Friends of the Occoquan.

You see - I have considerable capital in the "right ways" to be an activist. I could justify myself by calling on the traditional gate keeping to activism. I could even turn these same questions against the person who seeks to silence me. Because always these questions come up when I stand for women and women of color. But! I do not see the point in pitting women against each other. As Mary Daly insightfully points out, women should not adopt necrophilic behaviors such as self flagellation over who has sacrificed more for the cause. We do not need to starve ourselves to be Mother Teresa in serve to the Patriarch - not only is her life deprived of joy but her activism is hollow of gynocentric life giving energy. My work is not better or worse than other women's work based on the rubric of fitting these male models. I, biophilic, deserve a right to speak simply because I am alive as a woman. My creative pursuits are valuable and valid. My work must analyzed on the basis of its life giving, its support, its love.

Domestic Abuse & Activism

It’s periodically apparent to me that a lot of people have no idea how the police/legal systems deal with domestic abuse, be it spousal or child. I’m saying this as someone who went through the court system multiple times regarding being a victim of child abuse.

People don’t get that going to the cops once doesn’t magically make the abuser powerless or go away or anything like that.

In fact, going to the cops is likely to have the cops dismiss your abuse and then once they leave have the abuser escalate their violence. Male cops are twice as likely to commit dv abuse than the national average - so really you’re calling someone who likely sympathizes with your abuser.

As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution." (via the Atlantic)

Even if the cop means well, there are pretty strict limitations on what they can constitute as abuse for an immediate arrest. I would also point out that there can be racial and class markers for who gets arrested. A black man is persecuted by the police while a white abuser may not face the threat of arrest. Anyone who has read "To Kill a Mockingbird" would be aware of this sort of racial targeting where even an innocent black man make take the blame for a white abuser.

Domestic violence activists, therefore, must also challenge the racism endemic in our criminal justice system. (by Miriam Ruttenberg)

End even if you get a good cop and a good case and the right abuser where it’s going to be taken seriously and taken to court, it’s going to take a long time for the whole thing to be processed and the abuser can still continue to stalk, harass, and threaten you  until then. Especially if you have any sort of shared ‘property’ like a pet or child they’re likely to be targets.

The key result was that victims were 64 percent more likely to have died of all causes if their partners were arrested and jailed than if they were warned and allowed to remain at home. The death rate was much higher among African-American victims than among whites. (via the crime report)

For example in my DFS case, even if you have a good case of abuse and your abuser is supposed to follow a court set program, maybe no one follows up on the case and you’re still stuck with your abuser who now knows that you are trying to leave. so the violence and isolation increases. The court system is designed to return a child to their home, with minimum standards met; I felt in grave danger of being returned to a place a neglect with penalties for trying to leave.

"Actually a survivor leaves an average of 6-8 times and each time she leaves, the violence can often escalate. Women who leave their abuser are at higher risk (75% greater risk) of being killed than those who stay. Either staying or leaving the abusive relationship poses risks to her safety. A survivor that stays in the relationship oftentimes is strategizing the best time and safest time to leave." (via Building Futures)

Even those abusers who are caught and forced to go to treatment by the police and legal system may not change their vviolent behavior.

One example: There are as many as 2,500 "batterer intervention programs" around the nation. Shawna Andersen of the Massachusetts Parole Board reviewed all the research literature and concluded that there is no evidence that sending an abuser to such treatment is better at preventing future violence than no treatment at all. (via the crime report)

I trust women to protect themselves as best they are able. I do not trust cops to protect women; I expect cops to sympathize with abusers.We need to acknowledge that the current system is set up with the racist policies of the police and the violent goals of the prison industrial complex. Activism regarding domestic abuse - spousal or child - needs to be about providing women safe spaces away from their abusers and the abuser class (men). Women need to trust women's experiences with abuse to know how to best keep themselves save; women need to open their homes, hearts, and ears to provide support and resources to women who are seeking refuge and support due to domestic violence.