New Feminism; Fear and Loathing.

"Feminists should be fighting Capitalism, the thing that divides us from our male counterparts..."

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I rarely don the banner Feminist but the time has come to take that name back from the strange and dangerous path it is going down.

TERFS

We feminists fought hard to enter the halls of male-only segregated society, and now we have so-called feminists fighting to reinstitute that sick and sad segregation under the infantile guise of “safe spaces.”  One such bigoted woman actually wrote a letter chastising Veterans for Peace for posting an anti-harassment post that read:

Veterans For Peace does not tolerate discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status or sexual orientation, in any of its activities or operations.

VFP affirms the rights, humanity and identity of trans and gender diverse people and will not accept trans-phobic behavior or remarks.

VFP will take the following affirmative steps to address all forms of discrimination including discrimination against transgender and gender diverse people.

1. Veterans For Peace will hold a workshop during the 2015 convention on transgender issues.
2. Veterans For Peace is developing protocols to address membership and staff complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status or sexual orientation.
3. The Veterans For Peace Board will introduce a national VFP resolution calling for Equality for all transgender veterans and active duty military as well as a call for Equality for all transgender people in all aspects of society.

In what world does someone like Chelsea Manning, a heroine born into the wrong gender identity, threaten our female identity?  This smacks of the hatred shown the gay and lesbian community in the past. In what way, one could ask, is the sanctity of your marriage threatened by gay marriage? It is the exact same reductive, binary and wrong thinking! This TERF (Trans-exclusionary radical feminism) brand of feminism diminishes the movement and throws our allies to the same wolves we were once fed to.  She, and those that supported her demand for segregation fall far from the real Feminists that fought for inclusion.

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Our society, especially our female demographic, is voluntarily reducing themselves to the level of helpless children. I don’t need a segregated safe space.  Every space should be safe, and if it is not, then we fight until it is!  These women are begging for the absurdity of “Separate but Equal” in some misguided attempt to Jim Crow women for our own supposed security. Don’t even get me started on the college campus safe space thing; once a bastion of activism and change, now somewhere with binkies and coloring books!

Feminism is being rebranded back to the man-hating, angry caricature of us that brought the label “femi-nazi” to popular vernacular.  That must NOT be our face; that is not who we are. Hating or fearing men, let alone transgendered women, does not bring about a society of equality and peace, a balance of power or unity.

PATRIARCHY

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]atriarchy is still a problem.  As is sexual harassment. (I will address that further on).  Yes, men still run most companies, have the most power, make more money, and hold the most seats in Government. That sorely needs addressing. Yet, it is counter-intuitive and counter-productive to demand a seat at the table, while running off to “safe spaces” like children who need protection – women are not children.

In addressing Patriarchy, it is imperative to realize that it is merely a tool of Capitalism. Capitalism needs layers of a “keeper” class in order to keep a lower layer of cheap labor.  Women overall make 80 cents to the dollar of men, but Black Women only make 63 cents to the dollar of men. Racism is another Capitalist tool. 

Add that to the fact that the days of a single-income home are long over, while the job market continually shrinks? The earning ability of all citizens is shrinking, the economic disparity is growing:  “according to Oxfam, just 42 individuals own as much wealth as the world's poorest 3.7 billion people. (snip) while 82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world's richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.”

Feminists should be fighting Capitalism, the thing that divides us from our male counterparts.  All men and women need to feed their families. Men and women should be allies. Workers of every race should be allies. Under Capitalism, war, greed, theft and accrual of resources has been a male-dominated force. All of the things that are wrong with our society cannot be addressed by electing a woman who supports that inequality. New feminists backed Hillary Clinton for having a vagina.  Real feminists opposed her, because her agenda to continue with this traditionally white, rich, male path was completely against our own interests.

While Trump is a shit-show, the deep state is using him as a distraction to pass the same legislation they would have under Hillary. Just as Obama’s drones went unmentioned by the Bush anti-war, and his Quantitative Easing (read welfare for the rich) broadened the class war, Hillary had a deep unholy alliance with Wall Street and Banking, and never met a War she didn’t love. Yet blinded by the new-feminist movement, 3^rd party voters were damned for voting for a much further left candidate in Jill Stein.  And Hillary supporters are the ones clanging the War Bell at Russia with mindless fervor.

Feminism has truly lost its way when it decries Patriarchy, yet seeks to run it the same way – by Capitalist Class War, and world Hegemony.

#METOO!

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] am a rape survivor, and a survivor of several attempted rapes. I think it is imperative for women to feel not alone, to talk about it, and to put rapists in jail.  I am tired of victim-blaming, the idea that being incapacitated means permission, that attire is causal or that any woman anywhere was “asking for it.” 

As a feminist, I will fight for my sisters until my dying breath.  I have taught my son that if there is no enthusiasm, there is no permission. I am glad to see the smarmy world of casting couches exposed, and the predatory nature of some men in power punished. I would love to see pedophiles castrated.

But as a feminist, I also have to admit that there are women who use sex as their currency, willingly and knowingly.  Not as manipulated victims, but with full rational adult thought.  I’ve known strippers and dancers, prostitutes both male and female.  It is, as they say, the world’s oldest profession. I’m not going to jump on some sex-worker bandwagon, here.  No, but I also refuse to shame them for their own choices of what to do with their own bodies. This excludes of course, sex-trafficking in minors, or by force – those people I would gladly kill with my own two hands.

The conversation around this topic has gone off the rails, though. When a young woman goes to a famous person’s house for a hook up, tells him to slow down and he does, and then proceeds to blow him because he pointed to his lingering erection in his pants?  It is not rape, coercion or sexual assault.  I have heard women argue that a 20 year old woman is almost a child, and too easily influenced to make that choice knowingly. What the fuck, feminists?  She walked across the room, unzipped his pants and sucked his penis of her own volition. You want to say she is a child? At twenty? Full. Stop. NO!

For decades, we fought men treating us like children who needed male guidance and protection, and you are claiming an adult woman cannot make her own choices?  She could, oh, I don’t know, USE HER WORDS, and say “No, fuck you, I’m out of here!”  She could have left. This was not rape.  This was not “pressure” this was a woman, who while on a date with another man, forced her phone number on a guy who had already blown her off earlier.  It may have been a shitty date.  He may have been a horrible kisser.  But this woman had a choice, and she made it.  I refuse to treat women like infants in a world out of their control. Real feminists empower women, not see them as helpless victims.

I get that new feminists want to support her, and see any critical thinking as victim-blaming or being undermining to the cause. This feminist wants to be treated as a full and lucid participant in my own life, with real choices and the ability to make them. Just as with Clinton, I will not support someone just due to their having a vagina, when they are making erroneous claims to ruin a man’s life. I will not support a woman who is wrong. I am just as certain that there are women, who for whatever reason, will make claims as vengeance against men who have done nothing or even for their 5 minutes of fame. As it stands?  No man can ever be freed from that accusation now, it is the 2018 version of a Scarlett Letter; he will be branded for life, with no chance of parole, no hearing, no justice.

Is touching someone’s back, or knee, sexual harassment? While I reserve the right to my own body, human body language is hard-wired.  Who doesn’t hug a crying person?  Who doesn’t reach out and touch someone in empathy?  There is a huge difference between groping and a casual touch. We have retreated into a digital world of personal space and zero human interaction.  A whole generation will never know how to act among other humans for fear of recrimination. Intent matters.  Reaction matters.  Feminism means being able to say, “Excuse me,” and asking to not be touched if it makes you uncomfortable, and being able to tell the difference between actual harassment and someone trying to console you. Feminism also means we stand up for ourselves if touched inappropriately – loud, hard and strong.  Feminism also means we can hug back.

To the millions of women who have been crowded and groped by a boss, have had some drunk try to kiss you in a bar, been sent dick pics or asked to show your tits by a coworker?  Kick their asses. Out them, sue them; kick them in the nuts if you can.  That is actual harassment. To rape survivors like me?  Convict them if you can. Learn self-defense.  Buy a fucking gun, and get trained in its use. I mean it.  I feel for all of you, and hope you get justice, closure and peace.

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LANGUAGE MATTERS

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ere is where men have to grow up a little.  Ok, maybe a lot.  It is never cool to call me “sugar tits,” unless you'e in my bed, at my request and I have poured actual sugar on them for you to nibble off.  And let's face it; that is never going to happen.  So drop it, and all equally sexist names from your lexicon already. See what I did there?  Real feminists not only have humor, we can wield it like a weapon when we want to.

“You would be so much prettier if you smiled,” is annoying as all fuck. It's not really harassment, though. It does imply that our faces are only there for their viewing pleasure. Rather than whine about men saying it, I choose to empower my bad-ass feminist self and reply, dead pan, “Yeah, I might smile if there was someone interesting nearby, but no.  Definitely not.”  Or the equally effective, “I’m sorry, what the fuck do I owe you a smile for?” or even, “I just buried my dog/kid/mother,” just to watch their horror stricken faces, their open mouth, their utter embarrassment. Like any other human, men will learn from feedback loops that saying dumb shit begets negative reactions.

Again, let's not go off the rails here.  There is a fine line between harmless flirting, meaningful flirting, kindness and harassing language.  It has gotten to the point where young feminists take any compliment as hate speech.  No honey, “You look nice today!” is not harassing language. This actually happened to my son, and the girl in question stood up, berating him in front of the class, saying he was harassing her sexually, and how dare he talk about her looks, and voice rising, “Who the fuck asked you to comment on my looks?”  My son calmly responded, “Ummm, you did.  Yesterday.  Before we left you said you got a new outfit and you thought it looked bad on you, and asked us to tell you what we thought tomorrow.  I was trying to make you feel better about it.”  She apologized, and they remain friends to this day.  But that anecdote is hardly isolated.

Poor young women!  Far from the bra-burning days of freedom in halter tops, they are marketed push up bras, that mash flesh into cleavage.  They are sold highly sexualized clothing from pre-teen ages on up.  They worry about their hair, their weight, their duck lipped selfies being good enough. They are culturalized into being sex-symbols, but told to be offended if any boy dares to even notice it. They want boyfriends, but are taught to not trust, if not even hate men.

Poor young men! They are bombarded with the constant taunt of sexual desire, but told they are pigs if they admit attraction in any way. They too, worry about being buff enough, hot enough, having good enough hair. They have no idea how to even start the process of dating. They want girlfriends, but fear girls.

Being of an age in which most would say, “I wish I was young again!” I find myself thanking the stars I don’t have to navigate young love in this day and age. What happened to courting, flirting, romance? If any admission of desire is taboo, punishable, all that is left is conflict, contracts and lonely masturbation. What happened to the sexual revolution?  Feminism has taken us from embracing our bodies, enjoying our orgasms, choosing our partners to again being ashamed of our sexual selves, and hating men for having equal desires.

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IT’S THE CULTURE, STUPID!

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y now, the new-feminist lynch mob is forming, but pausing to see if I will finally address “Rape Culture.” Sigh.

What you call rape culture did not happen in a vacuum. Let me parse this for you, if you will, as a female, as a feminist, as a socialist, as a radical activist.

Human bodies are not dirty.  Sex is not dirty. In fact, sex is not only a biological imperative, but also one of the most enjoyable things we can do as humans.  People have been having sex forever.  And liking it. Kids have been having sex. Middle aged people have been having sex.  Old people have been having sex. And no matter how much we try ...can we repress that?

It will never happen.

So why has Western Culture, what we call "the West"—chiefly the affluent Northern hemisphere EU and the anglophone bloc —become mentally ill, and I mean that in the most clinical way – about sex?

Because it has been commercialized.  Capitalistic. Twisted.

When our naked, free-loving, nomadic tribal asses started moving to cities, groups of people needed to control them in order to amass ever greater amounts of stuff.  Soon, they found religious control much easier than cultural control. Religion crosses borders, religion self-enforces obedience and conformity, and most of all?  Unquestioning fealty.

All three Abrahamic religions are based on the Old Testament, a book swarming with sexual content: full of concubines, polygamy, incest, and even fisting!  Yes I said fisting! “It is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, "Open for me, my sister, my love, My dove, my perfect one”…My love thrust his hand through the opening, and my feelings were stirred for him. (Song of Solomon 5:2-4)”

So how did this lurid by today’s standards text become the arch enemy of sexual freedom? In any brainwashing, you have to eliminate the ego of your victim, and replace it with your will.  If you can control a human’s very essence, their biological imperatives, you pretty much have their complete compliance for anything: Their money, their labor, their lives in war. The unquestionable acceptance of hierarchy – Church, King/State, Land ownership, Men and finally women became law.

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]eligion was used to make people accept suffering as their lot, and wait for some reward after death.  How can you bemoan poverty if you cannot even disobey your creed enough to jack off?  Seriously.  Think about it. This self-loathing reached its peak in Puritanism in the US, female genital mutilation elsewhere. Our bodies, especially female bodies could not be seen as beautiful and a source of pleasure, it became about ownership, control and power.  We covered our bodies, shamed ourselves for having them or desires.

The sexual revolution of the 60’s tried to address this. We embraced our bodies, and went as naked as legally possible. We made love to whom we chose, when we chose. But they swung the pendulum back on us. They commercialized us.  They bought and sold a revolution back to us, and we scarcely noticed. “Free the nipple” has become a thing in support of breast-feeding women, and I support it entirely. But in the last decade I cannot say I have seen anyone going braless in public. We women are censoring ourselves again. I do, and it is women who give me the stink eye.  Men rarely notice. Not that I don’t have great tits for a woman my age, but they have been trained to not dare to even look at a woman’s chest.  What’s next, burqa time? Social media will still ban you for posting a nipple under any context.  But you can talk about murder, and show graphic videos of it.

Now everything, and I mean everything, is sold with airbrushed, impossibly beautiful models with the allure of sex. Anorexic, breast implanted, botoxed models make our young women hate themselves, and give our young men an impossible ideal of what they want in a partner. Sex is in every bit of advertising. Yet, the lingering damnation of desire is rampant.  There are “Purity Balls” in which Daddies and Daughters do almost a mock wedding, in which the daughter vows to remain chaste until marriage. Monogamy and family values, evangelical churches; the barrage of sex-shaming is endless. It is twisting us. There is little more psychologically damaging than being taunted constantly with what you cannot have. It is in every fiber of our social fabric.  New feminism isn’t helping.  I can dress how I like, sure, but is it fair to damn men for looking at me if I do?  Look ? Sure. Touch? No. But it is kind of  like wearing camo with an orange safety vest:  Dude, you want to be invisible or seen, pick one!

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By the time they leave elementary school, US children have seen more than 6,000 murders in the years, with the average of 812 acts of violence an hour on television. Unlike European TV, which regularly shows adult couples making love as part of daily living, not for shock value, more like “Mom and Dad make up after an argument, isn’t that sweet,” US viewers get to see sex usually only as rape in a crime show.  Think about that.  Bombs ok.  Boobs, taboo.  We have normalized violence and criminalized sex. But wait, everything sells with sex.  Good?  Bad?  It’s so confusing. No wonder both our men and women are confused as fuck.

The Sexual Revolution and Feminism used to fight the good fight.  Now it has become a man-bashing, trans-bashing, self-loathing mash of angry white chicks, which gives not one iota for people of color or poverty. It seeks collective punishment of the other peasants for having a few crumbs more than us rather than to end peasantry.  It conflates real sexual abuse with “anything that annoys us.” It has taken the natural courtship ritual of a man trying to attract a mate and criminalized it. It is not about sexual empowerment, it is about sexual repression. It honors women who act like the worst of men, and damns women who seek peace in power. The way to end sexual repression is not with more sexual repression. The way to peace and unity is not through division and segregation. They way to empowerment is not cowering in fear. The way to love is not through hate.

This feminist wants a safer, saner world for all our daughters. This feminist wants a safer, saner world for our sons as well.

This Feminist feels that the New Feminism is making the world less safe, less sane and more and more prone to fascist binary thinking.

I am not your Feminist.  Now excuse me, while I take off my top, wander around with my socialist clan, make love to some random guy because I want to, and take over the world in Peace for all sexes.