My Perspective

I have been bad about responding to my email. I’m sorry. (Glad I’m not alone, though! Yay, solidarity!) I have no excuse but my own laziness, when it comes right down to it. If laziness is the same thing as having neither the desire nor energy to do much other than drag oneself to work, the grocery store, and home.

The bigot is sending women in the office (well, at least one woman, and I’ve always been of the ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire’ mindset) emails with pictures of women’s scantily clad breasts and buttocks attached. I don’t know if I should be glad or sad that he is no longer so stupid as to send that kind of shit my way. That would certainly liven things up.

Not wanting sex is not the same thing as just wanting friendship with a woman. I’ll perhaps continue this train of thought at a later date, though I admit that I have been remiss in fulfilling these sorts of promises in the past.

My first meme! Joan Kelly tagged me to participate, but I don’t really have anyone to pass it along to, so the train stops here on this line. I’m not sure if it counts as participation if you don’t do the pass along part, but oh well. Here goes.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

3000 Miles - Tracy Chapman

It’s OK - Tracy Chapman

Come Smoke My Herb - Me’Shell NdegeOcello

Sweet Lorraine - Patty Griffin

Heal Over - KT Tunstall

Sunny Came Home - Shawn Colvin

Goodbye Alice in Wonderland - Jewel

I have been having some health issues lately, so I’ve been spending a good deal of time in medical facilities, receiving generally substandard care.  No one seems to know what’s wrong with me.  And no one really seems to want to find out.  They are happy enough just to get my copay, and schedule follow-ups so that they can get more copays.

A co-worker of mine, of whom I happen to be quite fond, recommended that I go to see her doctors, instead.  She says she’s always had pleasant and therapeutic experiences with these doctors and she fully expects that I will too.  But she’s white and I’m not, so the people showing her respect and kindness in a doctor’s office may not feel compelled to treat me the same way.  In fact, the doctors I’m currently seeing all came highly recommended by white acquaintances of mine, but treat me with condescension and disdain.  Where my white acquaintances regale me with tales of gynecologists who make a point to make first introductions while patients are fully clothed, and gastroenterologists who helpfully offer samples of medicines before sending patients off to purchase prescriptions, those same gynecologists have, at first meeting, barged in on me before I could manage to get my paper gown wrapped around me, and those same gastroenterologists have refused to even prescribe me anything for my pain, let alone hand me a free sample.

Of course, this woman, of whom I am otherwise quite fond, does not understand why I refuse to call the doctors she recommends.  I tried to explain to her that even just suspecting that her doctors will treat me poorly, when they’ve treated her well, is bad enough for my mental health right now.  The last thing I need is to confirm my knowledge, yet again, that I am all but worthless in the hierarchy.  I mean, I’m already going to doctors held in high esteem by white acquaintances, who nevertheless condescend to me and disregard my complaints.  Why would I want to go to yet another set of doctors for more of the same?

So, she thinks I’m being offensively paranoid.  She feels slighted.  Clearly my not wanting confirmation that her doctors are racists is a worse transgression than the doctors being racist in the first place.  She can’t get past the implications for white people, of my refusal to take doctor recommendations from her.  The implications for black people, of white folk’s refusal to treat us like humans, though, never even cross her mind.

And me?  Well, I’m ready to just call it quits.  I’m sick of going to doctors who don’t give a shit about me, who don’t take my pain as seriously as their white patients’.  (And black doctors trained by racist white doctors are no better.)  I’m sick of taking the time out of my day to do it, of driving my car back and forth in the 90 degree heat, only to pay for the pleasure of being told there’s nothing wrong with me, despite my pain.  At this point, I’m ready to just keep popping pain pills and using heating pads until such time as I keel over and die of whatever it is that is wrong with me, or merely end up in the emergency room.

A good keyboard-chum of mine reminded me the other day about all of the overwrought histrionics surrounding my supposed advocacy of male infanticide. I’ve found it all so amusing, really, the way the slightest anti-male thing gets purposefully misconstrued as violent, irrational, and haphazard, that I haven’t felt the need to counter it with any sort of dignified response. For me, the raving attacks on me have only served to show my opponents in all their saturated male-identification.  But, for clarity, I thought I’d revisit that situation.

This is all I said:

We could do this [free ourselves from men] by refusing to be mothers to males. Even in places where abortions or other adequate birth control are lacking, women could refuse to nurse male neonates.

Then, Bird, whoever she is, in the very next comment, equated this, refusal of reproductive (and sexual) services to males, with killing them. Apparently, If you’re not offering up your wombs and extended nipples to the bastards, you’re KILLING THEM, I tell you! Says Bird:

I’m sorry, since when did feminism, even radical feminism, justify advocating infanticide?

Now, I, being the stickler for principle that I am, didn’t feel a need to justify such exaggerated offense with a response. So, knowing that I had not advocated any sort of infanticide, I told her exactly what I thought about infanticide, seeing as how she’d brought it up. And, yes, if the topic is infanticide, I still believe exactly as I did last year, that it would be a better lot than many women are offered in this world. And, I know this may be hard to fathom, but I can believe that without advocating its perpetration against men.

I’d say infanticide, especially in the cases of very young infants, is certainly more merciful than the murder and/or other abuse of fully aware women and girls.

That right there? I still believe that. I stand by it. Men are crueler to girls and women in allowing us to live than we need be in getting rid of them. How’s that for irony?

In any event, and just to be perfectly precise about my perspective, I know that we must drastically reduce (if not eliminate) the male population in order to assure girls’ and women’s safety from prostitution, marriage, rape, sexual indebtedness, and reproductive slavery. And, yes, I see birth control, abortion, and abandonment as being the route toward that reduced (or eliminated) male population.

Abandonment is not murder. Certainly, men faced with the prospect of abandoning their daughters aren’t jumping to the frenzied conclusion that it’s exactly the same thing as just snapping their little necks. Men go on with their lives, generally never to consider their abandoned little girls again, except in some cases when men come back tired of life’s thrills expecting a little of the family time they missed out on. (And they’re generally obliged.) Yet, mothers so deeply identify with their little patriarchs that, at least at that forum, they immediately leap to exactly this conclusion.

Considering the number of unhinged over-male-identified women who have followed me to other web places calling me a baby killer and waving this thread in people’s faces as proof of my everlasting insanity, with no doubt in their minds that they’ll be believed, I’d say their type of stand-by-your-son invective is pretty common and socially approved. In other words, it’s not radical.

By the way, saying that something isn’t radical isn’t an insult, you know. It’s not radical that I’m about to drive 5 miles across a tangle of intersections and overpasses in a car spewing pollutants to a desk job (that I only got because of my special set of privileged circumstances) in a capitalist economy. But I do just that five days a week every single week of the year. I don’t need anyone to pat my woolly head and tell me that my doing this is a good, radical thing, or that it makes me a good person. In fact, I don’t want anyone to console me about my complicity in systems of oppression. I certainly don’t consider that sort of condescendingly tender treatment to be friendship in any way.

So, I’m off to play my part in oppressing black and brown women and girls harvesting minerals from dumps and landfills and mines for the parts in the computers I use, and black brown women and girls living next to the chemical factories that make the plastic on just about everything I use, and black and brown women cleaning my office, and degree-less women, plenty of whom could do my job but over whom I was privileged (and will continue to be). I’d rather talk about my very real complicity in the suffering of other women and girls on the planet. I want to talk about the very real ways in which women my age are being compelled to add to that complicity, motherhood being a major way. I want to talk about the way that mothers wield this aura of (patriarchy-ordained) sanctity against other women, who are never allowed to critique the institution lest we offend Mothers.

We can talk about my diet of male babies when I actually eat one; until then, it is merely a reactionary diversion from the facts at hand and my arguments in light of them.

I’ve said before, most recently in this post, that collaborating with the patriarchy is one thing; using that collusion to elevate yourself over others, however, is entirely different. Using that privilege to gloat about your favored circumstances, in comparison with women who have never been privileged in such a way, or who have chosen not to cash in on it, is bigotry.

Mothers are often bigoted against women who choose not to have children, or who do have them, but choose not to raise them according to the nuclear family values of today, or who choose not to raise them at all. Mothers often elevate themselves over women who don’t have children, and “fallen” mothers, by appealing to the favors and rewards allotted to mothers in patriarchy(ies). For example, they often cite having someone to take care of you in your old age as being one of the reasons why the choice to bear and devote oneself to children is better than any other reproductive decision. But why would a woman want to perpetuate ageist notions about the social value of old women by falling in line with patriarchal norms dictating that only a crone’s purposefully guilt-tripped and manipulated children would ever, could ever, or should ever care enough about her to see after her needs? Why would a woman want to perpetuate nuclear family constructs, the continued supremacy of blood bonds over bonds of genuine respect and affection, at the expense of women who’ve chosen a different path? Why legitimize these women’s continued ostracization and neglect by society, by blaming the women themselves for their oppressed predicament, for we know that in a patriarchal society these women are only degraded and abandoned so as to be a lesson to any other woman not to flout patriarchy’s demands for sons?

I mean, to actually assert that old women without children should have thought about the oppressive patriarchal consequences of refusing to bear children before they chose (and, here, there is often some adverb - selfishly, rashly, naively) not to be mothers is to lend validity to the status quo. It is to cling to the favored status mothers enjoy in patriarchy, in comparison to women who are not mothers, at the expense of a more radical conception of social welfare. It is to gloat about the rewards doled out on the basis of patriarchal collusion, and denied on the basis of noncompliance. I don’t see “Ha ha, I played the motherhood game and now I have some guilt-tripped kids to take care of me and you don’t, ha ha,” as being very feminist. In fact, I think it’s quite crone-hating. (Not to mention child-hating. I very strongly disagree with the idea that motherhood is some kind of exchange, wherein a mother raises children with the expectation that they should repay her for it in some way. It is the expectation, not the mere fact that some biological children may care for their aged mothers, that irks me.)

And not only this, but even when women do have children, there’s no guarantee that a mother’s efforts to instill in them an obligation to care for her in her old age will pan out. So, why the reactionary insistence that the choice to have children can save an old woman from suffering neglect? This only serves to distract from the system which has made old women disposable, whether they have had children or not, for the childbearing years are only so many in the first place.

Anyway, I had a particular post in mind when I wrote this, but I think the sentiment is widespread enough that it’s not necessary to point to it specifically. Besides that, I know that my questions above, about why a woman would perpetuate these notions, may seem like attacks. They are not. I sincerely want to know why women wring their every patriarchal favor for all the leverage over other women it’s worth. Why do women find our primary value in hierarchical conceptions of ourselves, when the hierarchy was erected without our input and to our detriment? I truly want to know why women have this need to feel better than other women, that the choices they made were better than other women’s, according to patriarchal standards. And I want other women who do that to know why they’re doing it too.

You know how appropriative and disrespectful and infuriating it is when men compare failing a test, getting a parking ticket, or having to work late to being raped?

That’s how appropriative and disrespectful and infuriating it is when white people make callous analogies to black slavery and other manifestations of racism every time they think it might help them to make a point.

And, you know, I imagine that the white women who are guilty of this give as much of a shit about black women as the men comparing their every manly woe to rape do about women in general.

The earth is a commodity.  It is a commodity because it provides us with things - food, shelter, resources.  It is a commodity whether or not we consider ourselves entitled to its bounty.  Of course, if we do feel entitled, and certainly everyone in the first world feels entitled, then we take and take, destroying the earth while we force it to produce what we want and not produce what we don’t want, with little regard for the earth’s well-being.

But even if we weren’t stripping the earth of all its resources like malicious parasites, we’d still be parasites - just benign, symbiotic ones.  Entitlement is not a requirement for the consumer/commodity relationship.  And nothing we do to minimize our consumption will change the earth’s objectified status.  We can only do our best to try to make our objectification/commodification of the earth as nonviolent and well-intentioned as we are able.

In the context of the male/female relationship, it is easy to see, then, that, biologically speaking, women are commodities for men.  Women provide men with sex and progeny.  Biologically.  Men are in the same position with regard to women as we all are in relation to the earth.  In other words, there is no way to make men not see women as commodities.  We *are* commodities.  Biology has determined this.  And this biological consumer/commodity relationship has nothing to do with the fact that biology has *also* made men, in general, larger and stronger than women.  Their being larger and stronger influences the cultural entitlement they feel with regard to women and the services/progeny they provide, but men being smaller wouldn’t change the fundamental consumer/commodity paradigm.

The only way to alleviate the violence against women within these parameters is to make men see that there is value in simply accepting what women choose to offer, whenever they may or may not offer it, without feeling entitled to the services of particular women.  This is the same option we have with regard to the earth.  We can do our best not to degrade the earth, harm the earth, strip the earth bare - we can do our best to be beneficent consumers - but we can’t stop being consumers of the earth altogether.  The earth remains our commodity no matter how we choose to treat it.

This is what I mean when I say that men are biologically incapable of seeing women as anything but commodities.

Now, I see reducing the consumer/commodity ratio as a good way of reducing mis-/over-consumption of both the earth and of women.  A lower human to earth ratio would do wonders for the earth, and a lower male to female ratio would do wonders for women.

I have higher expectations of women than I do of men.  Plain and simple.  Hell, I even have higher expectations of white women than I do of men.  I believe that men are biologically - hormonally, physiologically - incapable of seeing women as anything other than means (how *do* you make that word plural?)  to sexual and reproductive ends.  They may be capable of changing the cultures in such a way as to promote sympathy and good treatment for these sexual/reproductive commodities, but that wouldn’t change women’s objectified status.  For this reason, I refuse to waste my time and energy hoping and wishing the men would do better.  I refuse to waste my time and energy “blaming” the nebulous system they’ve set up in their honor.

My expectation that women, and white women, show themselves to be capable of peerness with one another is not a “double standard.”  It is my only standard, as I don’t have one for men at all.  To those women waiting around for Barack Obama (or any other man) to change his manly ways before they’ll address the bigotry in their own ranks, I can can only say this: you’ve certainly given yourself quite a nice long time to “righteously” wallow in the status quo, haven’t you?  How convenient.

Any woman measuring herself against a male standard is no radical feminist.  She certainly isn’t an ally of mine.

I found myself explaining to a white gay male coworker not too long ago that I don’t think it’s enjoyable to walk alone in the park. He’d been haranguing me to get some fresh air there, noting that plenty of single women walk and run in the park and that he’s always felt perfectly safe and that there are even “nice older Koreans doing Tai Chi there.” He said “nice” the same way a professor of mine once said it when he told a Tamil woman that she was light-skinned enough to get herself a “nice white boy” and have passable kids. “Nice” always means “unlike *your* people.” I guess the gay white man must have thought that only black men ever harass me.

Anyway, I do sometimes feel like a shut-in. And the gay white man had done a good job of making me reconsider that maybe I am a little paranoid. So, yesterday, I went to the park for a brisk walk, hoping against odds that no man would bother me.

It wasn’t a particularly remarkable walk. I enjoyed it, although I noticed, as always, that the other (white, Korean, and Indian) walkers would say hello or good morning to each other as they passed but they never said anything to me. When I finished my walk, I stepped to the side of the trail to do a few light stretches - nothing obscene, mind, just loosening my calves, quads, and shoulders. As I glanced up from my first calf stretch, I saw a “nice older Korean” man leering at me. I threw him a nasty look and hesitatingly went back to my stretches. I leaned my head to one side and closed my eyes, stretching my neck. I jerked my eyes back open, suddenly aware of how exposed and vulnerable I’d been, in my sweat pants and sweat shirt, neck bared and eyes closed, and sure enough, there he was, leering again.

I marched back to my car without finishing my stretches. Of course I’m stiff today.

This is why I stay at home. I don’t like being harassed or ogled. Not even when it’s one of the “nice” ones.

White male supremacy makes liars of us all.  Sometimes we lie outright.  Maybe we tell a harasser on the street that we have a boyfriend, rather than risk the escalation that an admission of unattachedness, or lesbianism, can bring.  Maybe we change our name to something less ethnic.  Maybe we say we have a headache (and this is not limited to heterosexuals).

But not all lies need be spoken aloud.  Some liars rely only on white hetero-male supremacist assumptions to insinuate falsehood.  Some liars will let people believe they are rich, or educated, or white, or straight to get ahead, or just to get by.  I don’t mean for the word ‘liar’ to belie a negative judgment, either.  It is simply a fact that lies of omission are still lies, and the people who lie in this fashion are liars just like any other.  And while in some instances, sure, a woman’s life or livelihood might be at stake, most often the only thing these liars risk with the truth is a little ridicule, ostracization, discrimination, and dismissal, as well as, of course, the economic repercussions that follow.

So, while I sympathize with the people who aspire to rise above their due in this way, whether online or in real life, the lies they tell are entirely self-serving and do nothing to alleviate the burden on those of us who have no choice in the matter of how we are perceived in our day-to-day lives.  I’m not saying that people have any responsibility to others, of course.  And I understand that people need their coping mechanisms.  At the same time, I don’t see any reason to frame these self-serving woman-hating, black-hating, lesbian-hating survival strategies as anything more euphemistic than they truly are.  All of these bullshit cutesy terms and phrases, like “being in the closet” and “passing” really do obscure the point.

There is only lying and telling the truth.  It’s really not more complicated than that.  Lie if you want, but don’t tell me it’s revolutionary.