diaryofandnwoman:

radmercy:

Women are the true cultivators and creators of life no god could ever and thats just the tea

sespursongles:

I was thinking about this post from yesterday again. Centenarian man says the key to living a long life is to have a woman around. Centenarian woman says the key to living a long life is to have no man around. And that other post about how studies consistently show that girls do better at school when there are no boys around, while boys do worse when there are no girls around. This is a pattern that holds true in other contexts; women tend to be happier, healthier, less stressed, without men; while the opposite is true for men.

It boggles the mind that with this kind of information out in the open, known, with obvious conclusions screaming in our faces, feminists today still ridicule and devalue the concept of separatism. It can take so many forms too—supporting female-owned businesses so that more women can earn a living without having a male employer; female-owned housing options because so many women are preyed upon by their male landlord; female-only vacation venues so that more women can have a male-free holiday every once in a while; supporting female creators so that women have more choices if they decide to only read female authors or listen to female musicians, and then of course the more ‘drastic’ fight for larger female-only institutions in society.
But while some of these struggles (usually the low-stakes, non-threatening ones) are sometimes given perfunctory support in the name of Girl Power, the larger topic of separatism is hardly ever given coherent thought, support or space to grow; the fact that the best thing feminism can do for women is giving more women in all strata of society the possibility to exclude men from various aspects of their life, is still pretty much taboo and rarely given serious consideration outside of small feminist niches (often disparaged as extremist or utopian). Instead, feminists devote most of their energy and resources to activism that still involves men at some level, or on supporting women who choose men and will ultimately siphon all that support and energy and time and money back to men. 

I didn’t expect to get 30K notes on my childbirth post and won’t have time to answer all the asks and comments I got about it, but someone asked what inspired me to write it—it was reading about the lives of the women I mentioned in that post. I read a lot about women’s lives, be it biographies or diaries or letters, so patterns become obvious, and all other factors balanced, if you value physical safety, intellectual growth and self-realisation, you have to come to the conclusion that not having a man in your home was and is a blessing. And really you could extend this to having any man in your life at all—father, brother, son, male employer… Among the memoirs I read this year there was one by a woman who was exploited and raped by her boss, and then Lydia Cacho’s writings about her fight to help little girls victims of sex trafficking and to keep her shelter for battered women open. I don’t exactly seek out this kind of stories—after the Cacho book I picked up the memoirs of a Hollywood actress, expecting it to be a fun mindless read, and there ended up being a long section about how she was molested by her older brother as a kid and ended up as an anti-CSA activist as an adult. I discovered that most American male politicians who outwardly portrayed themselves as good family men fought tooth and nail behind the scenes to try and prevent anti-child rape laws from being adopted.

When you read (or hear) enough women’s life stories you really have to wonder what feminism is good for if it doesn’t focus on helping women to keep men out of as many aspects of their life as they want, and fighting for female-only spaces and institutions (like Cacho’s shelter, but not only—the litmus test for useful feminist activism should be “Will this contribute to denying men access to women in some way, thus empowering the women who would like to keep men out of some aspect of their life?” The women who don’t want to keep men out will always be able to make that choice because our entire society is structured around supporting it. Feminism should support the other choice, make it possible and safe for more women. Criminalising pimps & johns while helping women exit prostitution contributes to that second choice. So do anti-child rape laws. And women’s bars or cafés. And women’s studies programmes (“gender studies” don’t). And anti-porn activism. And fighting for women’s right to father-free parenthood (eg right to use anonymous sperm donors, rather than wanting fathers to be more involved with their children. And generally fighting for the opposite of fathers’ rights, which are coincidentally a major concern of the MRA movement.) And fighting for legal family / social units where women can share property and healthcare and pass on inheritance. Etc, etc.)

The women who scoff at this or rush in with “not all men” are typically very self-centered (”I sure don’t want to separate from men, so why should I think of the women who do?”), and refuse to look any further than their own Good Dad or nice boyfriend (and it’s worth mentioning that Lydia Cacho said all the men she talked to in brothels, including the brothels offering child prostitutes, were ‘normal’ married men, probably described by their wives as good husbands and fathers.) Your average mainstream feminist will tell you that “feminism is about choice” but feminism should not concern itself with helping women choose men, as patriarchy already has this covered. Meanwhile, women’s choice to distance themselves from men is not currently supported by feminism at all, when it should be the beating heart of feminism. More often than not, it is derided and disparaged. Marilyn Frye explained why in her essay about people’s attitudes towards women who want to separate from men even in minor ways: 

[…] When those who control access have made you totally accessible, your first act of taking control must be denying access. Access is one of the faces of Power. Female denial of male access to females substantially cuts off a flow of benefits, but it has also the form and full portent of assumption of power. [And] if there is one thing women are queasy about it is actually taking power. As long as one stops just short of that, the patriarchs will for the most part take an indulgent attitude. We are afraid of what will happen to us when we really frighten them. This is not an irrational fear. It is our experience generally that the defensiveness, nastiness, violence, hostility and irrationality of the reaction to feminism tend to correlate with the blatancy of the element of separation in the strategy or project. […]

By comparing Charity and Sylvia’s life to the lives of their contemporary women who had 18 children, what I meant was “being able to choose to live free from men is a blessing”, but a lot of women have interpreted that post to mean “birth control is a blessing”. But the makeshift, imperfect shield that protects you from someone who might hurt you and doesn’t care if he does is a very minor blessing compared to the power to live your life free from this person and the associated worries. Has birth control empowered women to deny men sexual access if they choose to? (Some women have argued it has done the opposite.) Feminism has become a very hollow word but nowadays I measure the sincerity of a woman’s commitment to feminism by the support, help and sympathy she extends to the women who want to keep men out of their lives / sex lives / children’s lives / bars / feminist groups / etc.

Before anyone interprets this as “lesbian extremists want me to become a lesbian, leave my man and live in the woods with them” because many het/bi women feel threatened by separatism and lash out defensively when the topic is brought up—this is about being able to choose to keep men out of some aspects of your life, or your entire life. How this choice should be facilitated and how the women who make it deserve to be supported and respected much more than they currently are by feminism (I won’t even touch the obvious lesbophobia behind the rampant ridicule and contempt towards separatism). How feminism becomes just another patriarchal institution if it values & supports choices that include men more than choices that exclude men.

And although the creation of female-only options in society would benefit even the women who do not want to distance themselves from men (because then they would be able to make a real, informed choice between life with men and life without men, having experienced both), the fact that many women would not choose separatism is irrelevant. The feminists who fought for the right to divorce didn’t sabotage themselves with “What about the women who WANT to stay with their husband??” They fought to give a choice to all the women who don’t. They understood that some situations are beyond fixing and you have to be able to divorce. Feminism that fights to improve & reform men or to help women who choose men be happier & more comfortable with that choice is the equivalent of fighting for het couple therapy. Feminism that fights for separatist options and female-only spaces and institutions is the equivalent of fighting for the right to divorce. If you understand why divorce is important, you should understand why separatism is important. It’s actual female liberation—it’s not forcing any woman to swear off all men forever, it’s giving women as a class the possibility to choose to ‘divorce’ men as a class. Giving safe and good options to any woman who isn’t interested in ‘fixing’ men or her relationships with them but just wants out. A feminism that doesn’t fight for this has completely lost its vision.

aveganforlife:

“the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism–the lie that there can be such a thing as ‘men’s liberation groups.‘ 

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group, specifically because of a ‘threatening’ characteristic shared by the latter group–skin, colour, sex or age, etc. 

The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters, but those masters are not OPPRESSED. 

Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism–the oppressed have no alternative–for they have no power but to fight. 

In the long run, Women’s Liberation will, of course, free men–but in the short run, it’s going to cost men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.”

~~Robin Morgan

erynthriel:

“Farm women in Africa (and India) are the most overworked humans in the world, working ten to fifteen hours a day at a host of jobs. A typical Zimbabwean woman’s day begins at 3:00 AM. Every day she goes to the river for water, weeds the fields (breast-feeding her baby as she works), chases animals away from the crops, pounds grain into flour, prepares meals, and gathers wood (steadily walking farther with these heavy loads because drought and over-cutting have depleted fuel wood). She helps her husband cultivate cash crops, processes food (threshes, dries, grinds), and carries it to market. She has weekly tasks like laundering. In the Ivory Coast, adult women’s workload is twice men’s; in Burkina Faso, women do all household work and still spend 82 percent more time on farm work than men. A Tanzanian man complained, “Water is a big problem for women. We can sit here all day waiting for food because there is no woman at home. Always they are going to fetch water.” (Emphasis added.)

Women’s traditional right to hold land varies from one to another African society, but in practice most women need living husbands to get access to land. Men hold such tight control of land that a woman who cultivates land owned by a husband who works in the city is not allowed to decide what crops to plant. Most Lesotho men work in South African mines, yet their wives need their permission to start a farming operation, hire a share-cropper, or get a loan from a credit union. Because they lack land rights, women cannot get credit. In many places, they cannot even join cooperatives that control credit, transport, and marketing. Nor do they have the right to the income from cash crops, even if they raise them.

Producing cash crops often raises family income, yet studies of projects that give men new technology to raise cash crops show that despite increased income, the family eats less and poorer food. Women’s and children’s nutritional levels fall because the income belongs to the men, who use it to throw “prestige feasts” or buy transistor radios. Men in Cameroon at least pay their children’s school fees, but in Kenya, writes Irene Tinker, men gamble, buy liquor, and rent prostitutes, while their families starve – women can no longer raise food for the family because their work and the family land are given over to the men’s cash crops. In India, researchers estimate, men spend about 80 percent of their earnings on themselves: motorcycles, radios, watches, television sets, movies, alcohol, and prostitutes. African migrant workers send home a mere 10 percent of their earnings on average; women residents in the hostels in Cape Town roll their eyes at the men’s “toys,” as they call them – cars in various states of disrepair that clutter up the space around the hostel. In the United States, too, huge numbers of men desert wives and the children they have fathered, spending more on themselves while the family is forced onto welfare.

Studies also show that when women have resources or earn income at all, children’s nutritional levels and well-being improve. Indian women, for example, consistently spend 95 percent of their earnings on their children. Indians have a saying: “A penny to a woman is a penny for the family; a penny to a man is a penny for the man.” Yet when Zambian tax code was amended in 1986 to give women half of the child allowance that had formerly gone to men, Zambian men complained women would waste it on “perming their hair, buying makeup and expensive dresses.” Yet most Zambian men earn little and appropriate their wives’ wages as their property, and most male employers exclude women from wage labor. Such lopsided systems increase male dominance and make it hard for women to negotiate or demand what they need to support themselves and their children. Because men rarely take responsibility for children, the children of the world are at risk.

The most blatantly exploitive form of development is what is called sexploitation or sex-tourism, a new business, tours for men to Third World countries to visit brothels created specifically for them, womaned by virtual slaves – girls, often just children, sold into bondage by poor peasant fathers. Sex-tourism was proposed as a development strategy by international aid agencies. Maria Mies writes that the sex industry was first planned and supported by the World Bank, the IMF, and the United States Agency for International Development. Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea are the present centers of Asian sex-tourism. Parties of Japanese businessmen are flown to one of these centers by their companies as a reward. American workers at a construction site in Saudi Arabia, totally fenced off from the culture around them, were flown to Bangkok every two weeks to be serviced by Thai women working in massage parlors. Another part of the sex industry is marriage brokerage: private companies, most in what used to be West Germany, sell Asian or Latin American women as wives, openly advertising them as “submissive, nonemancipated, and docile”. Both industries are maintained by a support network of multinational tourist enterprises, hotel chains, airlines, and their subsidiary industries and services.

The global accounting system reveals the profundity of male contempt for the necessary in human life, treating not just women’s work but the environment as insignificant. In a damning indictment, Waring describes international environmental policies that directly affect all of us. Consider: economic statistics calculate the value of “undeveloped” rain forest in Brazil at $0. A standing tree offers shade and coolness, prevents erosion, and returns oxygen to the atmosphere. But it has no value in the GDP until it is cut down. Industry has polluted the earth irrevocably; many of us or our children will die from cancers caused by environmental poisoning, or will suffer miscarriage, stillbirth, blindness, organ damage, or insanity. But unless such poisonings become widely known, as at Love Canal or Three Mile Island, such illness is invisible to the UNSNA.

In fact, while common sense dictates that illness should be listed as a debit in national income accounting, medical care and medicines are given positive value. Economists say market prices (of medical treatment, in this case) are reflections of actual wants, but there is no way quantitatively to express wants for clean air, safe water, or standing forests. Nor is permanent damage to water, air, or ecosystems included in the accounting. The only item subtracted from the GNP is depreciation on the stock of capital goods – the cost of maintaining stock like nuclear bombs. The cost of cleaning up an ecological disaster is considered an expression of society’s “preferences”.

The most devastating indication of our values is that while producing and raising children, maintaining families, and preserving the environment count for nothing in global economic accounting, war is treated as productive and valuable. In 1988, the nations of the world spent over $110 for each man, woman, and child on military expenses – overwhelmingly more than on food, water, shelter, health, education, or protecting the ecosystem. Waring explains that militarization can be measured nationally as the share of the GDP devoted to the production of military goods and services or as the military share of a nation’s budget. It is measured globally by the military share of global production and the share of international trade occupied by armaments. From 1980 to 1984, world military spending grew from $564 billion to $649 billion (in 1980 prices), a growth rate of over 3.5 percent. Over 5 percent of the production of the world, 27 times more than was spent on overseas development, was spent on the military in 1983, most by industrialized countries. Global military expenditures in 1985 were $900 billion, more than the income of half the human race. Military expenditures surpassed the combined GDP of China, India, and all of sub-Saharan Africa – a sum comparable to the combined GNP of all of Africa and Latin America.

Waring cites an estimate of over 70 million people engaged, directly or indirectly, in military work, work counted as contributing to the GDP of their countries. Military work is counted as a valuable contribution to society; raising children is not. Nor do we value keeping them alive. In the twentieth century alone, the world has fought at least 207 wars that killed 78 million people. And while states glorify the soldiers who fight the wars, most of those killed in them are women and children. In each minute that passes, thirty children die from want of food or inexpensive vaccines; in that same minute, the world’s governments spend $1.3 million of wealth produced by the public (between two-thirds and three-quarters of it by women) on military expenditures. This, Waring asserts, is the real war.” - excerpt from The War Against Women, Marilyn French, 1992

nocountryforlesbians:

p cool to not only love women but also be one!!!

radpresscreceipts:

Necrophilia

In real life, and as mirrored in media images, boys and men are obsessed with death.  Mary Daly referred to this obvious male preoccupation with death as “necrophilia,” meaning the love of death. Men’s necrophilic tendencies are not limited to literally sticking their dicks into corpses, although it includes that; necrophilia refers to men’s obsession with death and all things related to death and antithetical to life, including neglect and abuse, causing reproductive harm, rape, murder, torture, war, inflicting physical and emotional pain generally, and placing themselves and others in harm’s way in every way. Where women are interested in and indeed heavily invested in preserving and nurturing life, often because they have to, or face legal or social consequences if they fail, men are working very hard to undermine women’s efforts to nurture life at every turn.

Why? Because…

Necrophilia supports male power. Obviously, the power to take life or to cause extreme suffering is a form of power, and men embrace this power fully when they torture and kill animals, girls and women, and each other. Where boys and men are obsessed with death and creating destruction, women are left to perform damage control, utilizing all their time, energy and resources on mitigating the harm that men inflict; women are then left with few or no resources to use towards building a female-centered culture or to support our own interests. This diversion of women’s resources away from woman-centered and non-patriarchal ends is deliberate. The unusual man who is even slightly interested in nurturing or preserving life is the beneficiary of enormous false gratitude, but when women make a mistake or are unable to perform caretaking duties at a high level for any reason, we are severely punished by patriarchal institutions which place extreme controls on women’s lives and enforce our caretaking role with institutional violence, including incarceration. Of course, it is frequently men’s necrophilic actions such as PIV-centric sexuality creating unwanted or ambivalent children, or men harming themselves and others, that create the need for women’s usually unpaid, institutionally-unsupported caretaking labor in the first place, and opening the door to patriarchal institutional control over women’s lives. Granting men the power to open the door to institutional patriarchal control over women is critically important to and supportive of male power.

X

objetpetita:

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country.”
—Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“I was made for another planet altogether.”
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“(I-woman, escapee)”
—Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

gender-has-failed-us:

“Male culture was and is parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.”

— Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution