image of Dwaine Tinsley: cartoonist (creator of "Chester the Molester" published in Hustler magazine for years), good friend of Larry Flynt, and incest perpetrator of his daughter, is from here

From this blog website: http://heartlessriot.com/post/990641874/misandry-is-not-feminism. My reply to it follows.



Julian Real's reply:

Feminism isn't "misandry" and those tired old quotes don't make it so. They are trotted across the internet more often than the "important" news of which female celebrity was caught in the paparazzi's photographs not wearing any make-up. You're really misleading people here with this post, and it's sad to see--again.

Feminism has always been anti-rape (against anyone), against violence (against anyone), and for equality and dignity and human rights, for raising boys to be humane, for raising girls with self-esteem and confidence.

The people who most promote the hatred of men are MEN, not women. Haven't you noticed that? It is men, after all, not women, who start and maintain wars, right?

The people who do hate women most dangerously are men, and too many of them demonstrate it in ugly and lethal ways, as we all got to witness when recently hearing Mel Gibson be verbally threatening and insulting and degrading to Oksana Gregorieva, or with Phil Spector's murder of Lana Clarkson. We have story after story of male serial rapists and serial killers in the news, which also seems like a storyline prime-time programs like CSI, NCIS, and Law and Order cannot do without. How many more times do we have to see a young, thin, white woman appearing to be dead, bloody, wrapped in plastic, to "entertain" mass U.S. audiences? Those shows, every week, don't show bloody, naked, young pale men in plastic, do they? Who writes those story lines: women or men?

Lies are spread about feminists being "man-haters" by reproducing  five or seven or a dozen quotes, as you do above, as if we couldn't do precisely the same thing with just quotes that have left the lips of male actors, or that were composed by "great" male novelists, essayists, or playwrights. Shall we conclude then, that those men's quotes are representative of how most or all male actors, novelists, essayists, and playwrights feel about women? Why do men's rights activists regularly, online, promote this the double standard:

A few hateful comments by men towards or about women are indicative that some men are bitter about women because sometime in their lives a woman probably hurt them very badly; but a few quotes by some feminists, often from works of fiction or as noted in statements that have been made up completely (evidence linked to below), mean that feminists who disrespect or disregard men in some way are speaking the one truth that all feminists believe--or that even the feminist being quoted believes?

Is that fair? Is what you do above fair to feminism?

Why the very selective quoting? You could promote feminism with the quotes listed below. Feminists were and still are trying to achieve: an end of male violence against women and an end to rape. Feminists work to achieve equal rights, including equal pay for the same work done by men, and feminists note that "housework" is hard work.

See this for more on how your blog post dovetails with what anti-feminist men's rights activists spread across the web:


http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/08/catharine-mackinnon-is-not-proponent-of.html


http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/06/those-mratrolls-and-their-list-of.html

Why don't you put up the quotes below, by radical feminists? I'd recommend that you at least balance out the post you have above by also posting these (not just in a comment by me) to show how even more feminists, including the one's selectively (like Dworkin's and Morgan's) or quoted out of context (like Stanton's) by you above, really feel about men's humanity.

"The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself." -- radical feminist Audre Lorde

"People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals." -- radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon

"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." -- radical feminist Robin Morgan

"[A] legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women —- with men relating to that the best they can." -- radical feminist Robin Morgan

One of the most spuriously quoted lines by Marilyn French is one from her novel, The Women's Room. It reads, "all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes."

What is next was quoted from her in 2007 and is NOT from her fictional characters:

"Most men are on our side. They like their lives better than their fathers' lives. They like being involved with their children. They like having a better relationship with their women." -- radical feminist Marilyn French

"I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else." -- radical feminist Marilyn French

"For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?" -- radical feminist bell hooks

"No one deserves brutality because of what they are, there condition of birth." -- radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

"Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more--also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth." -- radical feminist Andrea Dworkin

"Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust." -- radical feminist bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love)

"As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media." -- radical feminist bell hooks

Why do you quote Dworkin from a work of fiction? Does a misogynistic quote by Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway mean all male novelists hate women? And, noted above here, there are plenty of quotes you could cite by Dworkin that demonstrate she believed in the humanity of men. She was no man-hater, which is obvious if you read her work carefully and know anything at all about her life.

The Stanton quote was obviously written in response to the predominant and prevailing view that white men are superior to all women, of any ethnicity.

Let's visit a few of the quotes by men, throughout history. Because given what follows, you ought to conclude what you do about "feminists": that a few carefully chosen misogynistic quotes from men who say hateful things about women are representative of how men feel, generally, as a group. Is there or isn't there a double standard about what quotes mean when compiled in curiously biased ways?

Below are just a tiny sampling demonstrating that men's institutionalised hatred of women is centuries old and exists across many societies. These are men, who, unlike anyone you cited above, occupied positions of significant political leadership and social influence with actual power to control institutions and societies that radical feminists, as yet, have never had.

Jack Holland details the ways in which both the Greeks and Hesiod viewed the figure of Pandora.

 ‘The Greek phrase used to describe her, kalon kakon, means ‘the beautiful evil’.’

In Hesiod’s words...
 ‘From her comes all the race of womankind
 The deadly female race and tribe of wives
 Who live with mortal men and do them harm.’

Tertullion, one of the founding fathers of the Catholic Church, famously harangued the archetypal feminine thus...
‘And do you know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway, it was you who first violated the forbidden tree and broke God’s law. You coaxed your way around man whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: man!’

 ‘Woman is a stupid vessel over whom man must always hold power, for the man is higher and better than she is.’   Martin Luther, Protestant Reformationist. (NOT Martin Luther King!)

 ‘A man with a hundred tongues who lived for a century would still not be able to complete the task of describing the vices and defects of a woman.’  Mahabharata, Hindu.

Georg Hegel, wrote in his ‘Philosophy of Right’...
 ‘Women are certainly capable of learning, but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy...Women acquire learning – we know not how – almost as if by breathing ideas, more by living really than by actually taking hold of knowledge.’

Friedrich Nietzsche said that...
‘When a woman inclines to learning, there is usually something wrong with her sex apparatus.’

And it lurches into the twentieth century with the words of Otto Weininger on the absolute nothingness of women...

‘Women have no existence and no essence, they are not, they are nothing, Mankind occurs as male or female, as something or nothing...the meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity....A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her mental processes...she may be regarded as ‘logically insane’.    From ‘Sex and Character’, 1906.

Dr. Max Baff, Professor of Psychology, in 1910:
‘All women are fundamentally savage, and the suffragist movement is simply an outbreak of emotional insanity.’

‘Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of saying no, it is a question of how she says it, how she shows and makes it clear. If she doesn’t want it she only has to keep her legs shut and she would not get it without force.’  Judge David Wild, 1982.

And here's another bit of "brilliance" by Martin Luther:
‘Men have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and accordingly they possess intelligence. Women have narrow shoulders and broad hips. Women ought to stay at home; the way they were created indicates this, for they have broad hips and a wide fundament to sit upon, keep house and bed and raise children.’

‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of senses and hands...’  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man.

I haven't even tapped the vast body of "great" literature, exposing all the quotes from those famous misogynists Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. I haven't even shown images of woman-hating mass produced by pimps like Larry Flynt of Hustler, who thought monthly cartoons created by a convicted incest perpetrator of his daughter, Dwaine Tinsley, and good friend of Larry's, about how funny it was to be a child molester. I've shown no images by Bob Guccione of Penthouse, such as his "classic" photographs, in his magazine, of East Asian women wrapped in white sheets appearing to have been dropped off a cliff onto rocks, as if dead--in a pornography magazine for men's entertainment (according to men and the fact that they said they enjoy the images). I haven't begun to quote what all those men have to say about women and especially feminists that is disgustingly pro-rape and virulently woman-hating.

So will you correct the perception you leave readers with above about what feminists generally believe, and please also clearly indicate what men, historically, have done to subordinate women, that far too many men still do?

How do I get over my crush on Andrea Dworkin?

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Men sometimes claim their testicles do the directing of their actions when objectifying or harassing women, or that their brains are in their the head of their penis. I disagree. John Mayer proclaimed that his penis is a white supremacist, even while other parts of him--his butt-cheeks, perhaps--are not. I again disagree. I think all men are fully humane, even while many humans do horribly inhumane things. I love humanity and I hate inhumanity. This means that the more someone proclaims atrocity as "good" or "in need of protection" or "inevitable", the more I question the depth of the humanity of the person speaking.

I believe rape is an atrocity, not an accident. I believe genocide is organised, not an oops! I believe misogyny is part of the fabric of patriarchal societies, not the attitude problem of a few rare men who got their hearts broken by a mean, mean woman. For this, men make fun of me. Or, they try to deride and degrade me, not my views. Their arguments, to them, are logical.

I publish writing by women who do not respect the violations and degradations that rapists, batterers, pornographers, pimps, and slavers enact against female human beings. I publish the writings of women who despise what men do in the name of being men, or the misogynistic acts that men commit in order to be more manly as their male supremacist culture defines the term.

I publish my own views that men who do not work to stop misogynistic violence and discrimination are complicit with that abuse. With a few publicly known and notable exceptions, men will not challenge other men on matters of sexual violence against women. Many of the men who do intervene do so not out of respect for women's humanity, but rather out of disdain that another man has corrupted their female property.

Some men will act from the anti-patriarchal view that women are human, and as such ought to experience the depth and breadth of full human rights. Women, globally, do not, as yet. And it is men who stand in the way, more than any other group of people.

Some men turn away from men who start joking about raping women or counting up the number of "hot" women in view. Some men interrupt these men, call them out, explain that such behavior is inhumane, no less so for being shared only among men. The men, eager to bond with each other over putting down women--physically and verbally, will often shun the men who call them out, dismiss them, call them a f*gg*t and continue on with their deeply homosocial bonding. What men fear is the rejection of other men. What men want is to be respected by other men. And so they will bond over practically anything, no matter how horrendous, atrocious, or inhumane. Some men commit gang rape to witness each other behave in ways that bond them to each other as buddies. Men share their pornographic images and stories of domination and degradation of women, to arouse in each other the desire to be physically and emotionally close not to women, but to men.

Within this social context, many such men believe is that they--as a group, mind you--are more logical than another group--women. I've heard men state this. Many famous men have written extensively on the subject, as if what they were saying was worthwhile. Men believe their sexism, their put-downs of women, is "a logical conclusion" based on "objective" and irrefutable facts. And they think they are intelligent for arriving at this conclusion.

There are several forms of dismissal of radical feminist and profeminist arguments. One is to cast aspersions on the authors. This is so common as to appear practically natural among men (and some women) who are male supremacist but proclaim themselves to be anti-misandrist. This manipulation of language is yet another strategy. There is currently an effort underway to flood the mental marketplace of ideas with this term: misandry, and to pretend it references a social problem: women hating men. The problem, however, is woman-hating men. Men do not only hate women. Men also hate men and a case has been made that the term "misandry" ought to be used to describe men's endemic and prolific hatred of each other. I concur.

So we hear tales of "man-hating" feminists from woman-hating men, and what is these men's evidence: a quote or two from one or two books by a half-dozen feminists, often misquoted, or quoted out of context, or quoted from works of fiction but not noted as such by those casting aspersions. I call this logical phallusy.

I welcome any man to present to me a thoughtful, well-articulated, intelligent review of a radical feminist book--all of it. All the chapters. Whether a book by Malalai Joya, Nawal El Saadawi, Marimba Ani, Andrea Smith, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine A. MacKinnon, or Patricia Hill Collins, or the essays of Audre Lorde. There's an extensive list of authors to choose from. But as I am most familiar with the work of the authors above, I will ask any man to present a cogent, sincere argument against these writings, as long as the review is of an entire volume of writing.

Let's see if there is an anti-feminist man who can do this. I know many men are intellectually capable of it, but I haven't seen it happen yet. And this raises a question: why do they prefer to offer up sound-bite quotes than actually engage with a full text. I think it is because the arguments anti-feminists make about these and other authors cannot hold up to a complete reading of any womanist or feminist book.

For much more on the problem of logical phallusy, white phallusy specifically, please read this book, Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, by Dr. Marimba Ani, in its entirety, carefully and thoughtfully.

From this website, I reprint the following discussion of this important book.

YURUGU is by no means "light reading." It is a very thorough study of a
great amount of source material in European and African intellectual thought
and the result of what Dr. Ani refers to as "a 20 year sojourn through the
bowels of European thought." YURUGU definitely requires a careful and
considered approach in order to understand and digest the new information
and revelations therein. It is, however, must reading for all serious
minded Africans.

The study begins with a discussion of European thought and discusses the
uniqueness of European thought in its use of cultural thought in the
assertion of political interest. Dr. Ani says "intellectual decolonization"
is a must and we must create "cultural reconstruction strategies."

In Chapter 2 she differentiates between religion and spirituality. Dr. Ani
states that "spirituality rests on the conception of a sacred cosmos that
transcends physical reality in terms of significance and meaning." It
enables us to apprehend the sacred in our natural, ordinary surroundings.
And religion refers to the formalization of ritual, dogma, and belief, and
may or may not issue from a spiritual conception of the universe. She shows
how religion functions to sacralize a nationalistic ideology and discusses
how institutionalized Christianity and European imperialism are inseparable.

Chapter 3 discusses aesthetics as an expression of value. As Dr. Kariamu
Welsh Asante has said, "all aesthetics have their origin in resemblance" and
Dr. Ani shows how the myth of a "universal aesthetic" is created and used
by Europeans as a tool of imperialism.

In chapters 4 & 5 she examines the images and concepts of self and other
and how Europeans justify their treatment of "the cultural other."

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 discuss the relationship between what Europeans want
others to believe they are doing and what actually happens. Dr. Ani calls this
breach between word and deed "the rhetorical ethic." She shows how this
built-in hypocrisy catches Africans and others off guard because this
hypocritical component is missing from other cultures and concludes that
Native Americans were correct and prophetic when they remarked that
"paleface speaks with heap forked tongue."

Chapters 9 & 10 closely examine the themes of "progress" and
"universalism" in European ideology. And Professor Ani concludes her study
by "offering an interpretation of European culture that relates its
devaluation of spirit and extreme rationalism to its intensely imperialistic
behavior towards others.

"Secularization and desacralization are by-products of the process of
rational ordering." And since formalized Eurpoean religion has itself been
secularized there is no source of conflict with this process from "religious
" quarters. Dr. Ani says, "The difference between the militarists and the
missionary is only one of modus operandi; the blows of one are more
physically apparent; those of the other leave battered souls and cultures in
their wake."

By creating the concept of the "cultural other" Europeans have declared
most things primitive that they could not understand. Through misuse of the
Bible and racial religious imagery, they taught people to laugh at the gods
of their ancestors and accept the gods of their conqueror.

image of book cover of Yurugu, with image of author Dr. Ani on it, is from here

image of sculpture is from here

The first two months of this blog saw posts primarily challenging the racism of profeminism and articulating what WHM supremacy is. It also contained several posts on a white het male pro-feminist sexual assaulter of a young woman. His name was and remains Kyle Payne, and he proved himself to be completely unaccountable to women, and even to this white male blogger. What is clear from the start is that this blogger and this blog do not stand for hate, for bigotry, or for any form of genocide. That was the case and remains the case, despite what defenders and protectors of WHM supremacy say about what exists here.

Below are excerpts from three posts from that period, with titles of each post containing the link back to each in its entirety.


4 August 2008:
Whitemale Supremacy: What It Is and What It Does
[excerpts below]
I am a white man, which means I can be (and have been), at any time, in any place, a whitemale supremacist. This is not a revelation about my genetic code, or an indictment of my own soul. This is a statement about structural political reality.

Every time I side with a white person who is being racist, against a person of color who is challenging that racism, I become a whitemale supremacist. Every time I do not see how my actions, as a white man, silence, disrespect, invade, or threaten a woman of color, I am being a whitemale supremacist. Every time I project a racist-sexist meme onto a woman of color, and treat her as if she were my (our) projection, I am a whitemale supremacist.

Whitemale Liberalism would have us believe that white men are only whitemale supremacists when we wear white hoods and burn crosses on the yards of African-Americans. White Conservatism would have us believe that the time of white supremacy has passed, and now the real threat to all humanity (which, as defined by whitemale supremacists, means any threat specifically to white men as a group, or to our political status, privileges, and interests) is people of color: including poor Black people, poor Mexican immigrants, and other non-European U.S. Latina/os, angry or non-deferential Central and South Americans of color, angry or non-submissive Middle Eastern people, angry or non-obedient Asians.

White Conservatism has never acknowledged the unethical existence of male supremacy. White Liberalism doesn’t either: on a good day it says there is something called “racism” and “sexism” but immediately adds that those suddenly apolitical realities can “work both ways”. It claims a level playing field—an as yet fully illusory land of equality—whenever a white man speaks or acts in ways that are harmful and dangerous to women, especially to women of color. It claims to be brutally honest, bravely politically incorrect, necessarily truthful, and boldly noble as it does this. It is either ignorant or arrogant in these claims, except the part about being brutal.

Men of Northern, Western, and Southern European descent have, for centuries, claimed the power to name reality, to decide what it true and what is false, to construct the meaning of intelligence and the parameters of insanity, to make laws and gods which most serve white men and oppress everyone else, to distinguish what is respectable religion from what is delusional cult or irrational myth, to declare, with whitemale state authority, the qualities and standards of what it means to be human, which somehow, not accidentally, leaves out the humanity of those who are not white, wealthy, or male.

It claims to value peace when it is warring, to love when it is hating, and, especially if liberal, to value free speech while it swiftly silences those who speak directly about the atrocities white male supremacists commit deliberatley or unconsciously, or, in either case, unconscionably.

Those unprivileged “others” who must know it and name it, viscerally or verbally, in order to have a chance to survive with any degree of dignity or esteem, will be defamed or destroyed for doing so, if they are seen as human at all, which is not a given in whitemale supremacist societies. This means whitemale supremacy usually ignores all voices that don’t speak in its domination-driven dialect, with a Euro-American accent.

When the politics of reality are spoken by a woman of color, her voice will be distorted in the ears of whitemale supremacists. They will not acknowledge this voice as humanitarian. They will call it all manner of sexist-racist names, and treat it according to how enemies of whitemen’s supposedly sacred (self-centered) reality are to be treated. Whitemale supremacy cannot acknowledge the full humanity of the woman who owns that voice, because she is being so corruptly and systematically denied human status by those with the unjust authority to give it.

Whitemale supremacy is death to humanity and non-human life forms: suicidal, genocidal, and ecocidal. When it is radically and successfully challenged and transformed, humanity can rise again, sustainably, including the humanity of those who are pale and male.

White women and men of color sometimes support but do not control whitemale supremacy. Only white men control it. Not all white men need to enforce it for it to thrive, but if all white men spoke our truths—against the interests of whitemale supremacy—about what we have done to women of color, to white women, to men of color, the other Life, and to ourselves in order to be whitemale supremacists, then at least and at last the white elephant in the room would be named by those with the privilege and power to name it.

White men know our history well (we wrote the books, after all, from our perspective). We banish anyone else’s history, calling it invalid, biased, or unscientific. We, white men, do not take the time to seek out the knowledge and truths that threaten to decenter and destabilize us, let alone wrest unjust power from our blood-stained fists.

White men, please, in the meantime, tell the truth about what we have done and are doing to maintain whitemale supremacy.

Break the bonds of the white supremacist brotherhood. Politically, and radically, betray every white man you know who values the well-being of his white brothers over his Black sisters and other sisters of color.

Understand: this betrayal is a tremendous act of love.

Stop apologizing for and excusing white men’s oppressive behavior. Nurture a conscience and a heart that sees all people as people. Actively support and be accountable to those we oppress who are working to sustain dignity and to institutionalize justice infused with empathy for humans raped, sold, enslaved, starved, and silenced. In these acts of compassionate rebellion, we will be nurturing, with the rest of humanity, societies free of organized, systematic harm, as communities of color self-direct their liberation from whitemale supremacy.



31 July 2008:
White Supremacy and Profeminism
[excerpts below]

The most immediate issue I want to address is what does it mean for women's liberation that Western profeminism is white-dominated and eurocentric?

To me it means this: our Western white supremacy will remain unchallenged in this movement, if this is, indeed, a movement.

A discussion among feminist bloggers about the degree to which radical feminism is white supremacist has been happening for some time. I do not recall this discussion ever happening among profeminist men: why?

If white men in the West control and dominate everything from media to the study of philosophy, how are radical women of color's voices and white feminist voices to be heard, let alone be responded to responsibly?

To which radical women of color and white women, feminist identified or not, is any white man fully accountable? To have politically active progressive to radical white men centralize the struggles of, and speak to the issues which most greatly impact women of color and white women worldwide--what would it take for that to happen?


14 August 2008:
Reality-check, part 1: We Live In A White Male Supremacist Society
[mildly edited version below]

How is it that so many men in the U.S., especially those with class, race, and education privilege, can be so completely ignorant of ubiquitous social phenomena like misogyny, anti-Black racism, genocidal anti-Indigenism, and heterosexism? (To name but four expressions of the dominant ideology-in-practice.)

Part of the answer is that the privilege itself is a distancing mechanism from experiencing what most people (women) in the world experience. But even when we know what's going down, though study and empathic connection to women in our lives, we are generally reluctant to adequately or accurately name (out loud) the harm we do to women. Part of the answer is also that we never radically and sustainably challenge the systems of harm we live in and benefit from substantively because we benefit so much.

Given the choices we have created, living as a white man is a significantly less degrading and difficult human experience than living the life of a woman, of any color. Men suffer, including white men, including rich white men: we get depressed, we get cancer, we suffer great losses of loved ones. But we don't know how or to what degree people who are not us suffer and endure and assume it is more or less like what we experience. It isn't. We also don't wish to recognize that those we oppress are generally less dehumanized than we are. The dehumanization is a prerequisite and a part of being a white man, socially speaking. (I here use the terms "white" and "man" only as social-political categories of humans, not as biological or "natural" terms.)

Our silence and apathy, in a world that rewards us while others generate our rewards, is a powerful and central cause and consequence of white male supremacy. It might be less problematic for us to claim we "see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil." It might be convenient to claim we are "the Good Germans" who didn't know what was happening to Jews and other ethnic, cultural, and political groups cattle-carred into showering rooms and ovens, gassed then burned to ash or buried. The dishonesty of such claims is that we know what we do; we simply refuse to tell others about it, especially ourselves. We speak evil, we hear evil, we see evil, assuming we have those senses. We do the evil, but call it "natural", "inevitable", "inconsequential", or "not my fault".

The U.S. is cluster of social systems of hierarchically arranged gendered, raced, classed, and sexed power has many regional differences and permutations, shifting over time. Within the last two hundred years, or more, there is and has been an overarching ideology from its inception crafted by the "Founding Fathers". As soon as was possible, institutions were established to protect the gross entitlements and unjust privileges of those who created the institutions: wealthy white men. The values and principles infused in these institutions were appropriated and esteemed inside a social context where only white men were deemed fully human: "heterosexuality" as such, was not a lifestyle choice that was fully formed, while the racism and misogyny of homophobia and heterosexism were part of the bloody concrete slab this country was built on.

I refer to this ideology as white male supremacy: not "white supremacy" or "male supremacy". In this country, in my experience and the experience of the women of color I know, neither of those terms is inadequate to explain what we are living in, enduring, benefitting from, and practicing, to varying degrees, depending on our social location or station. This doesn't make "white male supremacy" the profeminist "politically correct" term. This makes the fusion of racism and sexism apparent from the start, as was the case here when european colonizers came and took root, like a foreign weed forever ecocidally and radically disrupting the civilizations that were here first. This "disruption" might be best termed ecocical genocide.

In the U.S. white male supremacy is also currently bound to an grotesquely inhumane and wildly savage form of corporate capitalism. Class divisions here, though, have always been infused with white male supremacist markers: to have money is to make one more white and more a man. To be rich is to participate, with greater agency and freedom, in the atrocities which are required for the system to "work". That it doesn't really "work" in any ethical, sustainable way is not supposed to be discussed in polite elitist social circles. Even the Academy is bound up in this mess, becoming increasingly corporatized with increasing control over what is considered to be " useful learnable knowledge".

Our corporate white male supremacist society (which is to say, people, engaged in social activity) destructively promotes,always with force and the threat of violence--a range of violent practices that accomplish the task of maintaining the elite's "interests" by any means necessary. The maintainance of the system requires people too oblivious, to callous, or too oppressed, to maintain it. It is never controlled by the oppressed, however, a point which white liberals fail to grasp, along with many other basics about the political reality of the U.S.

Many of the ideals and institutions of Western liberal societies are modified in the U.S. by specific forms of white social conservatism rooted in white Christian fundamentalist values and practices. Among the matters we must not dispute are the "natural, inherent" goodness of the allegedly nuclear family, the "natural, inherent" goodness of the allegedly heterosexual marriage, women constrained by raising children (however joyful an experiene it sometimes can be), and white male supremacist sex for men-on-demand, especially for white

To call this society only capitalist, or only white supremacist, or only male supremacist or patriarchal, is to willfully or ignorantly not grasp the depth of who is being harmed and why.

"Profeminist men" typically ignore some significant facet of what oppresses the women who live in the U.S. and Canada, to speak only of two highly white-populated countries. We either pretend "patriarchy" is the enemy, and sometimes grasp that white supremacy and capitalism are problematic as well, if not well integrated into our theories.

What is most often left out of our analysis, in my experience, is the ecocidal/genocidal dimensions of our racist patriarchy. While profeminism in the U.S. remains grossly anglo- and eurocentric in its worldviews and methods of discerning "what reality is", it is especially determined to keep from its center the perspectives and experiences of the Indigenous women of what is now called North America.

Until profeminism centralizes the experiences and concerns of women of color, including Indigenous women, it will fail to be, even in the imagination, let alone in social practice, a profeminist movement. A movement which invisibilizes and marginalizes women of color, or holds whiteness as a standard of human being, is not profeminist, it is white male supremacist, at and to its core.

Radical profeminism, in this view, is organized (effectively, with built-in systems of accountability to feminists and other radical women activists) to dismantle and radically transform those practices, policies, and philosophies which harm women of color, centralizing the hurtful-to-lethal experiences women endure and die from, disproportionately because they are women not men. This profeminism is inclusive of, but not organized around, the experiences and agendas of white women only.

White supremacist profeminists, as I'll term them, are committed to an understanding of the world, to a practice of activism, that is usually not fully accountable to feminist white women, and is rarely-to-never accountable to feminist women of color.

What this means is that white male supremacy is unchallenged at its roots.

What this means is that the majority of women--women of color, are not respected let alone consulted, are not read let alone studied, and are not seen as leaders let alone the founders of feminism.

image of Partridge Family poster is from here

I begin here. I am intergender, male-assigned and privileged, and white. See the "About me" section of the blog, on the right, along there somewhere above the never-ending list of websites of interest and blogs I link to for a link to what "intergender" can mean.

When I was a child, I didn't quite "get it" about their being only boys and girls and I sure didn't get it that there were *only* two races, although Three Dog Night tried to convince me in songs like "Black and White". I knew there weren't just two classes either, but sometimes media made it sound like if you weren't rich you were poor, and if you weren't poor you were rich. I also didn't accept that there was only one "good" way to have a sexual identity, which was always an off-shoot of a gender identity--kind of like the gender identity was the prerequisite to having a sexual one. You have to want to believe that "sex" is only about gender to even "go there". I refuse to "go there".

I got that there were those two social categories, and I also got that I wasn't really either one of them. It gets tricky when trying to describe to you what I was. One could say I was "in between" being a boy and and a girl, but given how different boys are, amongst themselves, and how different and diverse girls are, amongst themselves, this doesn't really work for me as an adequate way to describe my experience. For example, I didn't live in a social space between a so-called "tom-boy" girl and a butch boy. Nor did I live in the middle of a continuum between polar ends of being a so-called "femme" girl and a "femme" boy. Or between being a butch girl and a femme boy, or between a femme girl and a butch boy (however you understand such terms--which are, of course, culturally, ethnically, regionally, and era-specific to be sure). I liked spiders and snakes and toads and frogs and insects. (See, "spiders" are NOT insects, and I knew that when I was a child.) I like seeing birds and squirrels, not shooting them. My brother liked shooting them. I thought he was the anti-animals version of a sociopath. I liked playing with some dolls--not "baby dolls" but dolls like Skipper.

Currently I am asexual and aromantic, as much as possible. I didn't use to be either. I an not anti-sex and The Amazing Feminist Texican can verify that this is the case, as she and I have exchanged thoughts and analysis on sex, including on vibrators, and none of my views reveal that I believe "sex" is "bad", "evil", "wrong" or "gets you a one-way pass straight to hell--wherever the hell HELL is. Being anti-sexism isn't being anti-sex, after all. And unless ALL you experience as sex IS sexism, then you're not likely to misinterpret critics of sexism as being "anti-sex".

And being critical of gender as a system of political terrorism, force, violation, subordination, and domination is not to be *against* people with standard gender presentations or identities, any more than being anti-corporate patriarchy makes me *against* workers at McDonalds or Wal-mart. It is, however, to note the difference between workers at Wal-mart and the Walton family of Wal-mart. The former has almost no structural or institutional power to effect significant social change. The Walton family DOES have the resources to make a significant difference in the lives of ALL of their employees. ALL of them--all the many hundreds of thousands of them. That's the difference social/structural position makes.

As I see it--and I'm not alone--gender systems exist inside conjoined systems of race, inside of oppressive economic systems, and within systems of of global political dynamics like globalisation and the invasion and violation of the Global South by the Global North. These conjoined social hierarchies include whites believing and maintaining institutions that place them over and against people of color; similarly: men over and against gay men and all women; the middle aged over and against children and the elderly--should people live long enough to become elderly--and long enough to become children, for that matter.

I refuse to see "gender" as if it existed independently of those other realities. This isn't to say that I can't, for theoretical and analytic purposes, discuss "gender" without always talking about everything else. It is to note that should I do that, I'm necessarily abstracting people's real lives.

No one, these days, who lives in a society with media and industrialisation has an experience of gender than isn't raced and classed. That isn't shaped by heterosexist racist patirarchal imperatives and capitalist forces.

A white pro-radical feminist male view might seek to see what is patriarchal about race and class. What is gendered about whiteness and being wealthy. What is stigmatised and statused as "the degraded feminine" and "the glorified masculine".

But *this* profeminist will also keep turning over these phenomena, mixing and matching them, to see what is raced about gender as well, because with an understanding of intersectionality, deeper truths may be highlighted.

I grow weary of race analysis that forgets how gendered race is. Similarly with gender analysis that forgets the gendered people are raced.

The issue for this post is to what extent "subjective" and "objective" understandings of gender, in oppressively raced, sexual, classed and globalising contexts, supports radical coalition work towards the liberation of all people from oppressive systems in which some are dominants and some are subordinates, and many are both, depending on which parts of their lives we are discussing.

Here's one reality: a wealthy white gay man may exercise his power in a variety of ways. He may have stock market investments that support genocide and rape globally. He may choose to purchase an apartment building in a city where neighborhoods are experiencing racist/classist gentrification, thereby supporting the oppressive displacement of poor people, making some of them homeless. He may get beaten or called horrid names any day by any het man who seeks to express his homophobia against the nearest gay man to him. And he may participate in gay or heterosexual cultural events that are deeply misogynistic and racist, as well as heterosexist and classist. He may make fun of women who are heavy or of women who are... women.

The queer-identified people I know in the cities and sections in which I have lived are mostly white. Most of my friends are people who do not live near me. And most of my friends are not white. This means I get many views into queer and non-queer society.

With these multiple views, different truths are highlighted. Just as with the old parable about several blind men feeling a different part of an elephant, not realising they were ALL experiencing one being, so too do those of us who look at reality through one lens miss out on the whole of what we are looking at.

Gender is, first and foremost, political and enforced. It is secondarily social and institutionalised. It is, third, personal or individual, mediated in many ways. Fourth, it is tied to what is often called biological/asocial phenomena, such as the shape of genital tissue, the levels of various hormones in one's system, and chromosomal patterns. What gender isn't at all is "natural" as that term is commonly used in public discourse. A social justice movement which seeks to reverse this order is doing something that is VERY political, and VERY pro-status quo, and VERY oppressive: misogynistic, racist/white-empowering, oppressive to the Global South, genocidal, and ecocidal.

To make "gender" a primarily personal-individual-subjective matter is to deny the enormous force that is in no way purely "subjective" that is exacted against all of us to maintain male supremacy and patriarchal atrocities against the bodies of those deemed girls and women .

Dominant U.S. society wants us to all believe that gender is primarily natural, biological, and chemical--that it is a reality that is best intervened on with chemicals, medications, surgeries, and other "treatments" that seek to normalise and reinforce it as an oppositional binary: one is a man or one is a woman. And, if "transgender" one is a man (or boy) in a female body or a woman (or girl) in a male body. Or, maybe, on is also intersex and intergender and, honestly, dominant society just doesn't want to deal with that, other than to deny intergender reality exists, and to surgically change visually intersex people to "appear" more normal. Normal is always oppressive in a society in which norms exist to reinforce oppressive institutions.

If I am outside, in a social space, a police officer makes determinations about how dangerous I am based on many criteria--some highlighted more than others depending on where in the world I am. If I'm near the border in Arizona, the shade and hue of my skin as well as facial and other physical features are scrutinised, to determine if I might be "Mexican". In a white-majority/white-dominant/only white rural area, my class presentation might be most paid attention to, along with my gender presentation, including the degrees to which I stand out as possibly "gay".

As a white, male, intergender, non-intersex, adult person who is registered and treated socially as a white adult male, as, in many ways, a "man", I get how gender is both subjective and objective, and how that distinction is artificial on many levels.

I played jump-rope with girls rather than basketball with boys during elementary school recess. Many boys and very few girls took issue with me doing that (even though professional male boxers played jump-rope). Why? Because my actions were threatening to the boys, but far less threatening to the girls. The boys--most of them het--were shoring up their gender identities by socially reinforcing their sexist attitudes, their misogynistic practices and jokes, and their girl-excluding behavior. To see someone who appeared to be a boy willfully and joyfully engaging with girls in what the boys saw as "girly" behaviors, meant their own sense of themselves as "appropriate boys" was threatened. Because if I WERE a boy, and was playing jumprope with girls, how could THEY be boys and need to refuse to do so?

Their solution at the time was to fuse sexuality* and gender into terms like "faggot", "sissy", and "queer". This, in their minds, kept me "other" than what they were--or so they delusionally thought. That I wasn't any of those things didn't matter to them.

(*among the males, we were, most of us, pre-pubescent then and were not being willfully sexual with anyone, while surely a percentage of us, myself included, were being or had been sexually abused)

You might ask, "Julian--you WERE queer, weren't you? I mean I get how you'd not want to claim those degrading terms, but you were, well, 'odd' as someone perceived to be a boy wanting to play with girls in activities that boys steered clear of BECAUSE they were things girls did on the playground?" I'd say "No, there was nothing 'odd' about it. Nothing more 'odd', let's say, than liking The Partridge Family. Because here's the secret the "appropriate boys" didn't want you to know: they ALSO liked watching The Partridge Family, but felt too ashamed to say so, socially. What may well have been odd about me was my willingness to publicly align myself with girls who did so-called 'girly' things.

What we experience that is "subjective" is shaped by objective realities. Objective realities, like misogynistic violence, are bound tightly to idea and ideologies that some people are deeply invested in, financially, and in other ways, such as by fusing one's egoic identity to these ideas and ideologies.

I watch males who present as boys and men engage in practices and behaviors that shore up their identities and senses of self as "masculine"--and that is a highly conditional and relative thing. What it means to be "masculine" varies from culture to culture and era to era, as well as across region and across generations in one family.

What it meant to be a "masculine" male-man for my maternal grandfather was VERY different than what it meant to be "masculine" male-man for my paternal grandfather. My own father's ways of being "masculine" were not in accordance with white non-Jewish forms, in many ways.


End of Part 1. See the images below of people jumping rope--and you tell me how era, region, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender are related to each one--get busy, now: this assignment is due before Part 2 appears on this blog!

image of children, female and male, playing double dutch is from here

image of a very strong man, Mohammed Ali, jumping rope is from here

image of teenage boys playing jump rope is from here

image of a bronze casting depicting two girls jumping rope is from here

image of a girl jumping rope is from here

image of two children playing jump rope is from here

SUMMARY ABOUT THIS POST:
This is a series of posts about the effects of promoting ideas and analyses of gender that are not explicitly connected to the reality of male supremacy. Part 1 discusses children, gender stereotypes, social stigma and status, the problem of turning complex social realities into binaries, and of pretending those binaries aren't enforced. Also, this post poses questions about how race, gender, and sexual orientation are conjoined. There are also photos of some guys I think are CUTE. 

The conclusion of the series of posts will, I hope, make the case that social justice movements dealing with gender (and race and class and sexual orientation) are strengthened by offering up an intersectional perspective and by not playing down the reality of male supremacy.

Is it important, when speaking about gender, to note that it exists to maintain male supremacy? Is gender always related to race? What about race to gender? Is interest in jumping rope a sign of one's race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation? If yes, how? If no, why do some boys get made fun of for doing so in social spaces where girls also jump rope?

To approach this subject and these questions, I begin here: I am intergender, male-assigned and privileged, and white. (See the "About me" section of the blog, on the right side, along there somewhere above the never-ending list of websites of interest and blogs I link to for a link to what "intergender" can mean. It follows the quotes and recommended reading and has been recently revised.)

When I was a child, I didn't quite "get it" about their being only boys and girls and I sure didn't get it that there were *only* two races, although Three Dog Night tried to liberally convince me in songs like "Black and White". I knew there weren't just two classes either, but sometimes media made it sound like if you weren't rich you were poor, and if you weren't poor you were rich. I also didn't accept that there was only one "good" way to have a sexual identity, which was always an off-shoot of a gender identity--kind of like the gender identity was the prerequisite to having a sexual one. You have to want to believe that "sex" is only about gender to even "go there". I refuse to "go there".

I got that there were those two social categories, and I also got that I wasn't really either one of them. It gets tricky when trying to describe to you what I was. One could say I was "in between" being a boy and and a girl, but given how different boys are, amongst themselves, and how different and diverse girls are, amongst themselves, this doesn't really work for me as an adequate way to describe my experience. For example, I didn't live in a social space between a so-called "tom-boy" girl and a butch boy. Nor did I live in the middle of a continuum between polar ends of being a so-called femme girl and a femme boy. Or between being a butch girl and a femme boy. Or between a femme girl and a butch boy--however you understand such terms which are, of course, culturally, ethnically, regionally, and era-specific to be sure.

I liked spiders and snakes and toads and frogs and insects. (See, "spiders" are NOT insects, and I knew that when I was a child.) I like seeing birds and squirrels, not shooting them. My brother liked shooting them. I thought he was the anti-animals version of a sociopath. I liked playing with some dolls--not "baby dolls" but dolls like Barbie, but not Barbie herself, as she was too popular to hang out with people like me. I played with girls whatever girls liked to play, including card games, hand clapping/song games, and just talking about people. But if girls liked doing the things that boys traditionally or stereotypically liked to do, I didn't hang out with them. And the butch het boys--forget it. They were TOTAL losers. ;) I don't really mean that. They weren't total losers. They were the group that most put me down, though, and I learned to avoid them as much as was socially possible, especially since I lived with one who called me his brother. (Little did HE know!) I liked chess and I liked pop music, television games shows but not soap operas. I hate boy-team sports but loved the Olympics, especially girls' Gymnastics in the Summer Games and all of the Figure Skating in the Winter Games. Now I'm infatuated with Apolo Anton Ohno who's been in Short Track Speed Skating in three consecutive Winter Games. My interests have shifted over time. But not my attraction to some men.

image of Apolo Ohno is from here

Currently, the cutest guy on TV, well, until last night when he got tossed off the show, was Jose Ruiz, from So You Think You Can Dance. The sweetness in those eyes and that smile!!! O. M. G. Just melt me down and call me liquid butter. (Below is the only photo I could find that shows him smiling and close up. Jose's someone who is a great example of what might be termed "subjectively" beautiful. He's objectively beautiful too, but it's seeing him in life, not in a photo still, where his beauty really shines.)

image of dancer Jose Ruiz is from here

Here is another photo of him:

Jose Ruiz, publicity shot from TV show, So You Think You Can Dance

Is he sweet or what?!

Even though I can still have these little crushes of celebs, currently I am asexual and aromantic, as much as possible. I didn't use to be either. I an not anti-sex and The Amazing Feminist Texican can verify that this is the case, as she and I have exchanged thoughts and analysis on sex, including on vibrators, and none of my views reveal that I believe sex is bad, just plain negative, wrong, or gets you a one-way pass straight to hell--wherever the hell HELL is. Being anti-sexism isn't being anti-sex, after all. Unless you can only experience sex AS sexism, in which case you're likely to misinterpret critics of sexism as being "anti-sex".

And being critical of gender as a system of political terrorism, force, violation, subordination, and domination is not to be *against* people with standard gender presentations or identities, any more than being anti-corporate patriarchy makes me *against* workers at McDonalds or Wal-mart. It is, however, to note the difference between workers at Wal-mart and the Walton family of Wal-mart. The former has almost no structural or institutional power to effect significant social change. The Walton family DOES have the resources to make a significant difference in the lives of ALL of their employees. ALL of them--all the many hundreds of thousands of them. That's the difference social/structural position makes.

As I see it--and I'm not alone--gender systems exist inside conjoined systems of race, inside of oppressive economic systems, and within systems of of global political dynamics like globalisation and the invasion and violation of the Global South by the Global North. These conjoined social hierarchies include whites believing and maintaining institutions that place them over and against people of color; similarly: men over and against gay men and all women; the middle aged over and against children and the elderly--should people live long enough to become elderly--and long enough to become children, for that matter.

I refuse to see "gender" as if it existed independently of those other realities. This isn't to say that I can't, for theoretical and analytic purposes, discuss "gender" without always talking about everything else. It is to note that should I do that, I'm necessarily abstracting people's real lives.

No one, these days, who lives in a society with media and industrialisation has an experience of gender than isn't raced and classed. That isn't shaped by heterosexist racist patriarchal imperatives and capitalist forces.

A white pro-radical feminist male view might seek to see what is patriarchal about race and class. What is gendered about whiteness and being wealthy. What is stigmatised and statused as "the degraded feminine" and "the glorified masculine".

But *this* profeminist (you know, as opposed to the other three to five--lol) will also keep turning over these phenomena, mixing and matching them, to see what is raced about gender as well, because with an understanding of intersectionality, deeper truths may be highlighted.

I grow weary of race analysis that forgets how gendered race is. Similarly with gender analysis that forgets the gendered people are raced.

The issue for this post is to what extent "subjective" and "objective" understandings of gender, in oppressively raced, sexual, classed and globalising contexts, supports radical coalition work towards the liberation of all people from oppressive systems in which some are dominants and some are subordinates, and many are both, depending on which parts of their lives we are discussing.

Here's one reality: a wealthy white gay man may exercise his power in a variety of ways. He may have stock market investments that support genocide and rape globally. He may choose to purchase an apartment building in a city where neighborhoods are experiencing racist/classist gentrification, thereby supporting the oppressive displacement of poor people, making some of them homeless. He may get beaten or called horrid names any day by any het man who seeks to express his homophobia against the nearest gay man to him. And he may participate in gay or heterosexual cultural events that are deeply misogynistic and racist, as well as heterosexist and classist. He may make fun of women who are heavy or of women who are... women.

The queer-identified people I know in the cities and sections in which I have lived are mostly white. Most of my friends are people who do not live near me. And most of my friends are not white. This means I get many views into queer and non-queer society.

With these multiple views, different truths are highlighted. Just as with the old parable about several blind men feeling a different part of an elephant, not realising they were ALL experiencing one being, so too do those of us who look at reality through one lens miss out on the whole of what we are looking at.

Gender is, first and foremost, political and enforced. It is secondarily social and institutionalised. It is, third, personal or individual, mediated in many ways. Fourth, it is tied to what is often called biological/asocial phenomena, such as the shape of genital tissue, the levels of various hormones in one's system, and chromosomal patterns. What gender isn't at all is "natural" as that term is commonly used in public discourse. A social justice movement which seeks to reverse this order is doing something that is VERY political, and VERY pro-status quo, and VERY oppressive: misogynistic, racist/white-empowering, oppressive to the Global South, genocidal, and ecocidal.

To make "gender" a primarily personal-individual-subjective matter is to deny the enormous force that is in no way purely "subjective" that is exacted against all of us to maintain male supremacy and patriarchal atrocities against the bodies of those deemed girls and women .

Dominant U.S. society wants us to all believe that gender is primarily natural, biological, and chemical--that it is a reality that is best intervened on with chemicals, medications, surgeries, and other "treatments" that seek to normalise and reinforce it as an oppositional binary: one is a man or one is a woman. And, if "transgender" one is a man (or boy) in a female body or a woman (or girl) in a male body. Or, maybe, on is also intersex and intergender and, honestly, dominant society just doesn't want to deal with that, other than to deny intergender reality exists, and to surgically change visually intersex people to "appear" more normal. Normal is always oppressive in a society in which norms exist to reinforce oppressive institutions.

If I am outside, in a social space, a police officer makes determinations about how dangerous I am based on many criteria--some highlighted more than others depending on where in the world I am. If I'm near the border in Arizona, the shade and hue of my skin as well as facial and other physical features are scrutinised, to determine if I might be "Mexican". In a white-majority/white-dominant/only white rural area, my class presentation might be most paid attention to, along with my gender presentation, including the degrees to which I stand out as possibly "gay".

As a white, male, intergender, non-intersex, adult person who is registered and treated socially as a white adult male, as, in many ways, a "man", I get how gender is both subjective and objective, and how that distinction is artificial on many levels.

I played jump-rope with girls rather than basketball with boys during elementary school recess. Many boys and very few girls took issue with me doing that (even though professional male boxers played jump-rope). Why? Because my actions were threatening to the boys, but far less threatening to the girls. The boys--most of them het--were shoring up their gender identities by socially reinforcing their sexist attitudes, their misogynistic practices and jokes, and their girl-excluding behavior. To see someone who appeared to be a boy willfully and joyfully engaging with girls in what the boys saw as "girly" behaviors, meant their own sense of themselves as "appropriate boys" was threatened. Because if I WERE a boy, and was playing jump rope with girls (while not in training to be a professional boxer), how could THEY be boys and need to refuse to do so?

Their solution at the time was to fuse sexuality* and gender into terms like "faggot", "sissy", and "queer". This, in their minds, kept me "other" than what they were--or so they delusionally thought. That I wasn't any of those things didn't matter to them.

(*among the males, we were, most of us, pre-pubescent then and were not being willfully sexual with anyone, while surely a percentage of us, myself included, were being or had been sexually abused)

You might ask, "Julian--you WERE queer, weren't you? I mean I get how you'd not want to claim those degrading terms, but you were, well, 'odd' as someone perceived to be a boy wanting to play with girls in activities that boys steered clear of BECAUSE they were things girls did on the playground?" I'd say "No, there was nothing 'odd' about it. Nothing more 'odd', let's say, than liking The Partridge Family. Because here's the secret the "appropriate boys" didn't want you to know: they ALSO liked watching The Partridge Family, but felt too ashamed to say so, socially. What may well have been odd about me was my willingness to publicly align myself with girls who did so-called 'girly' things.

What we experience that is "subjective" is shaped by objective realities. Objective realities, like misogynistic violence, are bound tightly to idea and ideologies that some people are deeply invested in, financially, and in other ways, such as by fusing one's egoic identity to these ideas and ideologies.

I watch males who present as boys and men engage in practices and behaviors that shore up their identities and senses of self as "masculine"--and that is a highly conditional and relative thing. What it means to be "masculine" varies from culture to culture and era to era, as well as across region and across generations in one family.

What it meant to be a "masculine" male-man for my maternal grandfather was VERY different than what it meant to be "masculine" male-man for my paternal grandfather. My own father's ways of being "masculine" were not in accordance with white non-Jewish forms, in many ways.


End of Part 1. See the images below of people jumping rope--and you tell me how era, region, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender are related to each one--get busy, now: this assignment is due before Part 2 appears on this blog!

image of children, female and male, playing double dutch is from here

image of a very strong man, Mohammed Ali, jumping rope is from here

image of teenage boys playing jump rope is from here

image of a bronze casting depicting two girls jumping rope is from here

image of a girl jumping rope is from here

Image is from here.  While the pic isn't large, the ego more than makes up for it.  What follows is one of the most sexist pieces of shit advice and relationship counseling I've ever heard. My comments, this time, are not in bold, but are in brackets. His writing is in bold. I believe his enormously misogynistic ego demands it, because his bigotry towards women is so damned BOLD. I interrupt it

Image is from here.  While the pic isn't large, the ego more than makes up for it.  Saturday 3 July 2010 UPDATE: this post has been somewhat revised, with more analysis and a video added at the end. What follows is one of the most sexist pieces of shit advice and relationship counseling I've ever heard. My comments, this time, are not in bold, but are in brackets. His writing is in bold. I

[image is from here] I live in a beautiful, amazing country with a horribly violent government and callous corporate policies. Both Uncle Sam and Ronald McDonald pretend that they are doing the world a big favor, pretending they are very, very good to the global community they imagine they benefit with services and products that are presumed to be needed. I needn't pick on McDonalds, although