4Si4

nudecency:

“No more well-meaning ignorance, no more cooptation, no more assuming that this thing we’re all fighting for is the same; one revolution under man, with liberty and justice for all. No more. Let’s run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet…”¹ “[w]hite women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible.”²

1. Goodbye to All That, by Robin Morgan, 1970, reprinted in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall and Linda Gordon, Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.

2. How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get, by Christian Rudder, 2009. OkTrends / Dating Research from OkCupid.

nudecency:

Jenni Murray (BBC presenter): The novel imagines a future America under the violently repressive rule of a far right Christian sect. In the Republic of Gilead, women are forced back into the home and divided into domestic and reproductive functions… The book came long before the Taliban and Afghanistan. What influences did lead to The Handmaid’s Tale?

Margaret Atwood: If you look back in Western culture not very far you will find that similar types of things were going on in it, and have been going on in it really for many hundreds of years. In fact if you go back to the early church fathers you find them debating whether or not women have souls, and so it goes through centuries of history. […] Schoolchildren are sometimes told that the puritans went to North America to set up a democracy which is in fact entirely false. They went there to set up their own theocracy, which is what they did. […]

Jenni Murray (BBC presenter): How prescient did you feel you had been, Margaret, when Afghanistan happened?

Margaret Atwood: In a way that’s a bit of a side issue. It’s a bit of a diversion. We always are trying to displace our own problems and failures onto other societies, are we not? So rather than thinking about what we ourselves are doing, we look at what somebody else is doing and say, ‘Isn’t that terrible,’ which it is but that doesn’t let us off the hook.. if you see what I mean. […]

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Margaret Atwood (»») discusses her famous book, The Handmaid’s Tale, via BBC’s Woman’s Hour, via lostgrrrls

See also: “the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes…”

(Source: lostgrrrls)

[E]veryone who went up to the microphone said: “I’m a professional person, I represent such and such organization…” And bla-bla-bla, she gave her speech. “I’m a teacher,” “I’m a lawyer,” “I’m a journalist,” said the others. And bla-bla-bla, they’d begin to give their opinion.

Then I’d say to myself: “Here there are professionals, lawyers, teachers, journalists who are going to speak. And me… what am I doing in this?” And I felt a bit insecure, unsure of myself. I couldn’t work up the guts to speak. When I went up to the microphone for the first time, standing before so many “titled” people, I introduced myself, feeling like a nothing, and I said: “Well, I’m the wife of a mine worker from Bolivia.” I was still afraid, see?

I worked up the courage to tell them about the problems that were being discussed there. Because that was my obligation. And I stated my ideas so that everyone in the world could hear us, through the Tribunal.

That led to my having a discussion with Betty Friedan, who is the great feminist leader in the United States. She and her group had proposed some points to amend the “World Plan of Action.” But these were mainly feminist points and we didn’t agree with them because they didn’t touch on some problems that are basic for Latin American women.

Betty Friedan invited us to join them. She asked us to stop our “warlike activity” and said that we were being “manipulated by men,” that “we only thought about politics,” and that we’d completely ignored women’s problems, “like the Bolivian delegation does, for example,” she said.

So I asked for the floor. But they wouldn’t give it to me. And so I stood up and said:

“Please forgive me for turning this Tribunal into a marketplace. But I was mentioned and I have to defend myself. I was invited to the Tribunal to talk about women’s rights and in the invitation they sent me there was also the document approved by the United Nations which is its charter, where women’s right to participate, to organize, is recognized. And Bolivia signed the charter, but in reality it’s only applied there to the bourgeoisie.”

I went on speaking that way. And a lady, who was the president of the Mexican delegation, came up to me. She wanted to give me her own interpretation of the International Women’s Year Tribunal’s slogan, which was “equality, development, and peace.” And she said:

“Let’s speak about us, señora. We’re women. Look, señora, forget the suffering of your people. For a moment, forget the massacres. We’ve talked enough about that. We’ve heard you enough. Let’s talk about us … about you and me … well, about women.”

So I said:
“All right, let’s talk about the two of us. But if you’ll let me, I’ll begin. Señora, I’ve known you for a week. Every morning you show up in a different outfit and on the other hand, I don’t. Every day you show up all made up and combed like someone who has time to spend in an elegant beauty parlor and who can spend money on that, and yet I don’t. I see that each afternoon you have a chauffeur in a car waiting at the door of this place to take you home, and yet I don’t. And in order to show up here like you do, I’m sure you live in a really elegant home, in an elegant neighborhood, no? And yet we miners’ wives only have a small house on loan to us, and when our husbands die or get sick or are fired from the company, we have ninety days to leave the house and then we’re in the street.

“Now, señora, tell me: is your situation at all similar to mine? Is my situation at all similar to yours? So what equality are we going to speak of between the two of us? If you and I aren’t alike, if you and I are so different? We can’t, at this moment, be equal, even as women, don’t you think?”

But at that moment, another Mexican woman came up and said:

“Listen you, what do you want? She’s the head of the Mexican delegation and she has the right to speak first. Besides, we’ve been very tolerant here with you, we’ve heard you over the radio, on the television, in the papers, in the Tribunal. I’m tired of applauding you.”

It made me mad that she said that, because it seemed to me that the problems I presented were being used then just to turn me into some kind of play character who should be applauded. I felt they were treating me like a clown.

“Listen, señora,” I said to her. “Who asked for your applause? If problems could be solved that way, I wouldn’t have enough hands to applaud and I certainly wouldn’t have had to come from Bolivia to Mexico, leaving my children behind, to speak here about our problems. Keep your applause to yourself, because I’ve received the most beautiful applause of my life, and that was from the callused hands of the miners.”

And we had a pretty strong exchange of words.

In the end they said to me:

“Well, you think you’re so important. Get up there and speak.”

So, I went up and spoke. I made them see that they don’t live in our world. I made them see that in Bolivia human rights aren’t respected and they apply what we call “the law of the funnel”: broad for some, narrow for others. That those ladies who got together to play canasta and applaud the government have full guarantees, full support. But women like us, housewives, who get organized to better our people, well, they beat us up and persecute us. They couldn’t see all those things. They couldn’t see the suffering of my people, they couldn’t see how our compañeros are vomiting their lungs bit by bit, in pools of blood. They didn’t see how underfed our children are. And, of course, they didn’t know, as we do, what it’s like to get up at four in the morning and go to bed at eleven or twelve at night, just to be able to get all the housework done, because of the lousy conditions we live in.

“You,” I said, “what can you possibly understand about all that? For you, the solution is fighting with men. And that’s it. But for us it isn’t that way, that isn’t the basic solution.”

Asma’a Mahfouz, one of the young activists from the April 6 Youth Movement said in her interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper that, shortly after the protests started, “I was printing and distributing leaflets in popular areas, and calling for citizens to participate. In those areas, I also talked to young people about their rights, and the need for their participation.”

She continued, “I went to a street in Bulaq Dakrur (poor Cairo neighborhood), where I and a group of members from the movement intended to start protesting. At the same time, other members were doing the same thing in other areas. When we had assembled, we raised the Egyptian flag and began to chant slogans, and it was surprising when a large number of people joined us.”
[…]
As the demonstrations continued, every day broke new ground. It started with the educated youth, both middle class and affluent. They were soon joined by the oppressed and uneducated poor. Within a few days, the protests swelled to include all segments of society, including judges, lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, artists, civil servants, workers, farmers, day laborers, students, home makers, the underclass and the unemployed.
[…]
[T]he Egyptian people witnessed young women like Mahfouz, Isra’a Abdel Fattah, Nawwara Nagm, and Sally Tooma Moore, not only speaking out against the brutality and illegitimacy of the regime on live television, but also leading the demonstrators in chants and camping out in Tahrir Square for weeks.
[…]
[T]he women of Egypt have played a major role in this revolution. They demonstrated in large numbers, and were essential organizers, leaders, and spokespersons during all phases of the revolution, including during the most difficult times when they came under physical attack by the security forces and thugs of the ruling party.

They posted the calls for mobilization and uploaded their video blogs on the internet. They distributed leaflets and urged their neighborhoods to protest. They were subsequently beaten, injured, and some even sacrificed their lives. They chanted and led demonstrations against the regime.

Some were doctors, working side by side with their male counterparts treating thousands of the injured in the streets. They were part of the protection and security committees, patting down female protesters to ensure their safety. In short, they were part of every important function of the revolution. …

Esam Al-Amin, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Revolution” (Parts 1 and 2)

loveyourchaos:

“It is…unfair to ask a woman to leave aside her personal experience and discuss feminist issues in the abstract. You are discussing the stuff of her life. Asking her to “not make it personal” is to ask her to wrench her womanhood from her personhood. [Similarly,] you are not objective on women’s issues because you’re not a woman. Your perception is just as subjective as hers is, but for a different reason. Either we stand to be marginalized by privilege or stand to benefit from it. That’s the reality of institutional bias; it compromises us all.”

— Shakesville: Helpful Hints for Dudes (via reelaroundthefountain)

Sounds like what is meant here is that people are completely incapable of stepping outside of their self-interest when evaluating conflicts. If that’s true, if there’s no hope of “wrenching” our self-interest from our efforts at principled behavior, then there’s no point pretending there is any moral dimension to the discussion. And conflict resolution without a moral dimension is mere collaboration with power.

(Source: gerutha)

gauntlet:

“ They’re afraid of losing friends, of being laughed at, of being shrugged off or snubbed at the party, of being gossiped about, getting a reputation as a bitch or a prude or a humorless whiner, of receiving social penalties… ”
— Sady Doyle

If this image of shrinking triviality qualifies as a feminist view of girls then feminism can mean basically anything any female thinks.

(via gauntlet-deactivated20110608-de)

“Come on, compañera. Here’s where they talk about the most important problems women have. So here’s where we should make our voices heard.”

There were no more seats. So we sat on some steps. We were very enthusiastic. We’d already missed a day of the Tribunal and we wanted to catch up, get up to date on what had been happening, find out what so many women were thinking, what they were saying about International Women’s Year, what problems most concerned them.

It was my first experience and I imagined I’d hear things that would make me get ahead in life, in the struggle, in my work.

Well at that moment a gringa went over to the microphone with her blond hair and with some things around her neck and her hands in her pockets, and she said to the assembly:

“I’ve asked for the microphone so I can tell you about my experience. Men should give us a thousand and one medals because we, the prostitutes, have the courage to go to bed with so many men.”

A lot of women shouted “Bravo!” and applauded.

Well, my friend and I left because there were hundreds of prostitutes in there talking about their problems. And we went into another room. There were the lesbians. And there, also, their discussion was about how “they feel happy and proud to love another woman … that they should fight for their rights… .” Like that.

Those weren’t my interests. And for me it was incomprehensible that so much money should be spent to discuss those things in the Tribunal. Because I’d left my compañero with the seven kids and him having to work in the mine every day. I’d left my country to let people know what my homeland’s like, how it suffers. […] I wanted to tell people all that and hear what they would say to me about other exploited countries and the other groups that have already liberated themselves. And to run into those other kinds of problems… I felt a bit lost. In other rooms, some women stood up and said: men are the enemy … men create wars, men create nuclear weapons, men beat women… and so what’s the first battle to be carried out to get equal rights for women? First you have to declare war against men. If a man has ten mistresses, well, the woman should have ten lovers also. If a man spends all his money at the bar, partying, the women have to do the same thing. And when we’ve reached that level, then men and women can link arms and start struggling for the liberation of their country, to improve the living conditions in their country.

That was the mentality and the concern of several groups, and for me it was a really rude shock. We spoke very different languages, no? And that made it difficult to work in the Tribunal. Also, there was a lot of control over the microphone.

So a group of Latin American women got together and we changed all that. And we made our common problems known, what we thought women’s progress was all about, how the majority of women live. We also said that for us the first and main task isn’t to fight against our compañeros, but with them to change the system we live in for another, in which men and women will have the right to live, to work, to organize.

At first you couldn’t really notice how much control there was in the Tribunal. But as the speeches and statements were made, things started to change. For example, the women who defended prostitution, birth control, and all those things, wanted to impose their ideas as basic problems to be discussed in the Tribunal. For us they were real problems, but not the main ones.