In response to the murder of Sarah Everard, here in the UK, women and men have risen up and protested in support of women’s right to be safe. The peaceful public protests have instigated further violence against women under the guise of pandemic restrictions.
This is one DGR member’s response to the discussions about the level of violence against women and girls and the root causes. We need more men to speak out against patriarchy.
“Your silence will not protect you” Audre Lorde
Most of the women I know, intelligent woman all, are not as afraid as they should be. You can see how high the wall of patriarchy is as you look up at it. I can see from my perch up here also how thick the wall is and how many men are behind it, holding it up.
Men like me, every man, is dripping in entitlement. If you do not learn it in the family, they teach it at school. If school does not programme a boy then our culture will drown them in it. We are all swimming, all the time, in patriarchy. It is everywhere.
It works like a steroid for men and a poison for women. Sure, not all men react violently when on steroids but everything I do is based on my privileged position. My privilege is entirely normalized within society and entirely rationalized within me. Every man in Western culture is privileged and entitled due to patriarchy.
Can we dismantle patriarchy?
I am familiar with the argument that societies contain just the odd bad man; I disagree with this over simplified assertion. My view is that patriarchy is an offshoot of the ability to accumulate wealth and thus create perpetuating systems of oppression. The first systemic accumulation of wealth was the seizing and guarding of food grown in agriculture. Agriculture further has the effect of forcing us to learn to objectify living things (soil,nature, women) to keep our self-belief, our ‘right’ to take. Agriculture had the direct effect of causing violence in the pursuit of resources.
Of relevance, to this argument is the ‘abduction of a Sabine Woman’. Women were needed, viewed as a resource, and taken by those blue printers of modern society, the Romans. Forget that liberal Harari and his “I don’t know why women are oppressed”. Women have a value to conquering armies, not as fellow humans but as bounty of the conquerors. The rest follows a direct causal path. So, it is possible that patriarchy is not going anywhere whilst capitalism is here and objectification is the norm.
Can men do something, anything to improve the current situation?
Yes, of course. For all the reasons women state, for all the reasons women are protesting for. The law is on the side of men and we know that law shapes power. If it was a crime, with a significant consequence, for men to harass women in the street, if it was an aggravated offence after 8pm, then violence against women and girls would reduce. If the porn industry was recognised as harmful and measures put in place to curtail it then male entitlement might lessen women and girls may not be groomed, exploited, or damaged as much. If it was a serious crime for men to purchase women’s bodies then men would do it less and the support systems such as trafficking would be less profitable and therefore smaller.
I apologise for the terrible metaphor, but you must score when you are in the opponent’s penalty box. When was the last time that this issue was so central in the mainstream media? When will it be again? In the UK we could get something into law on this wave of interest. There will be a backlash. Men are lying low at the moment, but they will be back with a vengeance. I can imagine a male plain-clothed policeman patrolling a nightclub being interviewed for the Daily Mail and explaining how all the women dressed and danced in a provocative manner – the implication being … well you, women already know. You have been here before, fought before, hard won rights.
Do we have someone to rally behind?
Those in power throughout the ages, religion, political parties, the media, woke campaign groups have done a remarkable job of dividing women, turning them onto themselves on a personal level and fuelling horizontal violence at a structural level. The ruling classes are effective when oppressing dissenting voices.
The male driven denial of women’s rights, enforced at every turn by violence, is causal and symptomatic of an overwhelming amount of personal suffering and the unrelenting cycle of biome degradation.
This was written by a man, father and guardian in DGR.
For more on the creation of patriarchy, read Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy, or read this transcript of a talk Lerner gave on the topic.
Featured image: Abduction of a Sabine Woman (or Rape of the Sabine Women), a large and complex marble statue by the Flemish sculptor and architect Giambologna. Photograph by Mary Harrsch, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Editor’s note: That this incident from Roman mythology, in which the men of Rome committed a mass abduction and rape of young women from the other cities in the region has been a frequent subject of artists and sculptors, shows clearly how obsessed this patriarchal culture is with rape and violence against women.
I think women must be sensitized to the signs they perceive coming from men. You know I think I wilgo over to Medium and write on this. Women need to wake up before a man hurts them and avoid him
So, has the penny finally dropped for the pro-lockdown radfems? Or not yet?
It isn’t “like a steroid.” It IS a steroid, or at least a hormone. Men didn’t create it. We were born with it. We’re just another of the countless species organized around the principle of males taking what they want because they have the power to do it.
I began to think seriously about this when I rescued a female duck that was about to become the victim of gang rape, and already appeared to be injured. When I took her to the SPCA, however, she had somehow magically recovered, and flew away. The attendant explained that females often feign injury during mating season, for precisely this reason. (In addition, male ducks have corkscrew penises. How’s that for cruelty by “Mother Nature”?)
Little boys are hard-wired for destruction. When I was 5 or 6, my mother caught me throwing rocks at passing cars. And why was I doing this? Just to see what would happen. Testing the limits of power.
A couple of years later, some of the neighborhood boys and I started having rock fights, just for fun. We didn’t have any real differences. It was just a war game, preparing ourselves for grown-up stuff like Vietnam.
When I was 10, growing up in the Wild West of Texas ranch country, my father gave me a .22 caliber rifle. My cousin got one, too, and we would go out alone on the ranch, shooting anything that moved — rabbits, birds, turtles, skunks, armadillos — anything. And our fathers praised us for it.
Fortunately, I was either taught or somehow knew that treating girls like this was wrong. My aggressive impulses in other areas, however, were only curbed while hunting deer when I was 18. There was a doe season that year, and I accidentally shot a fawn, running in its mother’s shadow. Kneeling over its suddenly lifeless body, the right-and-wrong of killing finally sank into my retarded male brain.
I never hunted again, though it would take the Vietnam war to complete the lesson. I had enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into the Marines, and was sent to a munitions depot in Okinawa, where my job was to do the paperwork that transferred bombs to the war zone.
The reality of my role in the war didn’t sink in until I was sent to a B-52 base in Thailand, and heard the bomber crews boasting about the “thrill” of incinerating several acres of forest from 20,000 feet above. Then I read an article in a U.S. news magazine, about a North Vietnamese Army surgeon’s efforts to remove napalm-coated pellets from the body of a 9-year-old girl, who was among the victims of an “accidentally” bombed elementary school near Hanoi. Knowing that I had done the paperwork that made this tragedy possible, I suddenly realized that I was a war criminal, and became an antiwar activist almost overnight.
That’s just one example of what it takes to control the destructive, power-driven impulses little boys are born with. By nature, we’re just as dumb as bulls or male elk, smashing their horns into each other over who gets to impregnate the females of the herd.
That’s reason #1 why I chose not to have children (followed closely by overpopulation). One of my 3 greatest regrets in life is not having a daughter. But the thought of having a son who might be as destructive as my friends and I were was terrifying.
Even good parents aren’t always able to educate the destructive impulses out of little boys — especially when the dominant culture moves in the other direction. If society’s goal isn’t to raise boys to be “proud to fight” and dominate, then why are football games preceded by rituals like the national anthem, and overflights of military jets? None of that happens before track meets, tennis matches, or golf tournaments. It’s simply to equate head-butting team sports with the “glory of war,” and training society to believe that mass murder for the state is the ultimate in personal achievement.
@Mark I do not quite agree with your statement that men are hardwired to be aggressive. Yes, there is some relationship between testosterone and aggression, but that is a weak correlation.
The problem with male aggression has more to do with the other factors that you mentioned. First is, of course, reinforcement. Male aggression is rewarded through praises and a greater status among other males. This starts from a very young age. The basic principle of behavior modification is that any behavior that is rewarded gets stronger. Conversely, any behavior that is punished gets weaker and eventually disappears. Even if we believe that men were hardwired to be aggressive, if they had faced punishment for their aggression, they would have stopped being aggressive.
The second factor, related to the first, is power which is essential for a patriarchal society. Through this power comes a sense of entitlement, resulting in the violence and aggression to get whatever they want.
Third is the glorification of violence, as you said, in this culture, be it though violent sports, overflight of military jets, ubiquity of pornography, or the popularity of violent video games. It is, unfortunately, a large part of socialization of young boys.
Finally, most of the male children I’ve dealt with are quite sensitive, caring and kind. Those who are not usually (but not always) come from families that strictly enforce gender roles.
Deep Green Resistance have a radical feminist analysis. A key part of the radical analysis is the understanding that the basic social unit in society is a group. Some of those groups have power over other groups. Such is the case between men and women who are politically different groups with men having power over women. If you reject that analysis then the only explanations for why women are in an inferior social position to men are evolution, divinity or consent. By not understanding or recognizing or rejecting a radical analysis you offer up evolution as the explanation.
I cannot do better that to quote directly from Lierre Keith:
“If you remove power from the equation oppression looks either natural or voluntary.
If you’re not going to see that people are formed by these social conditions how else are you going to explain subordination? Either those people aren’t quite human, so they’re naturally different than us—that’s why they’re subordinate, or they’re somehow volunteering to be subordinate. Those are the options that you’re left with.
For instance, race and gender are seen as biological. These are supposed to be physically real. Well they’re not, they’re politically real.
It’s brutal, vicious subordination that creates those things. But it’s ideology, and it is the ideology of the powerful that says this is biological. They make the claim that this is biological because how are you going to fight God or Nature or 4 million years of evolution? Well you’re not.
There are physical differences between people who are from northern Europe and people who live at the equator, just like there are differences between males and females but those differences only matter because power needs them to. It is power that creates the ideology and it’s a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power.
These are unjust systems that we are going to have to dismantle, and these are social categories we are going to have to destroy.
Just like naturalism operates in the service of power, so does volunteerism. If you are not going to go the biological route, all you are left with is volunteerism as a concept.
This is the thing that liberals do not understand. With power removed from the equation, if it looks voluntary you are going to erase the fact that it’s social subordination”