Editors note: Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) was a historian, author and teacher. She was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University. Lerner was one of the founders of the field of women’s history, and was a former president of the Organization of American Historians. She taught what is considered to be the first women’s history course in the world at the New School for Social Research in 1963.
This excerpt comes from the final chapter of the book The Creation of Patriarchy (1983), and summarizes portions of the preceding chapters. While some of Lerner’s claims may in retrospect be overly optimistic (for example, she could not have predicted the explosion in internet pornography as a primary sex-education tool of patriarchy), the book as a whole is a excellent introduction to the topic of patriarchy and its origins.
By Gerda Lerner
Patriarchy is a historic creation formed by men and women in a process which took nearly 2500 years to its completion. In its earliest form patriarchy appeared as the archaic state. The basic unit of its organization was the patriarchal family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rules and values. We have seen how integrally definitions of gender affected the formation of the state. Let us briefly review the way in which gender became created, defined, and established.
The roles and behavior deemed appropriate to the sexes were expressed in values, customs, laws, and social roles. They also, and very importantly, were expressed in leading metaphors, which became part of the cultural construct and explanatory system.
The sexuality of women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified even prior to the creation of Western civilization. The development of agricutlure in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal “exchange of women,” not only as a means of avoiding incessant warfare by the cementing of marriage alliances but also because societies with more women could produce more children. In contrast to the economic needs of hunting/gathering societies, agriculturists could use the labor of children to increase production and accumulate surpluses. Men-as-a-group had rights in women which women-as-a-group did not have in men. Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men. Women were exchanged or bought in marriages for the benefit of their families; later, they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were part of their labor and where their children were the property of their masters. In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they then learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies.
Thus, the enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations. Class is not a separate construct from gender; rather, class is expressed in genderic terms.
By the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage of prostitution in order to advance the economic interests of their families. The daughters of men of property could command a bride price, paid by the family of the groom to the family of the bridge, which frequently enabled the bride’s family to secure more financially advantageous marriages for their sons, thus improving the family’s economic position. If a husband or father could not pay his debt, his wife and children could be used as pawns, becoming debt slaves to the creditor. These conditions were so firmly established by 1750 B.C. that Hammurabic law made a decisive improvement in the lot of debt pawns by limiting their terms of service to three years, where earlier it had been for life.
The product of this commodification of women—bridge price, sale price, and children—was appropriated by men. It may very well represent the first accumulation of private property. The enslavement of women of conquered tribes became not only a status symbol for nobles and warriors, but it actually enabled the conquerors to acquire tangible wealth through selling or trading the product of the slaves’ labor and their reproductive product, slave children.
…
To step outside of patriarchal thought means: Being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions.
Testing one’s statement by trusting our own, the female experience. Since such experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers.
Being critical toward our own thought, which is, after all, thought trained in the patriarchal tradition. Finally, it means developing intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther than our grasp, the courage to risk failure. Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most “unfeminine” quality of all—that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The hubris of the god-makers, the hubris of the male system-builders.
The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.
What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming. But we already know that woman’s mind, at last unfettered after so many millennia, will have its share in providing vision, ordering, solutions. Women at long last are demanding, as men did in the Renaissance, the right to explain, the right to define. Women, thinking themselves out of patriarchy add transforming insights to the process of redefinition.
As long as both men and women regard the subordination of half the human race to the other as “natural,” it is impossible to envision a society in which differences do not connote either dominance or subordination. The feminist critique of the patriarchal edifice of knowledge is laying the groundwork for a correct analysis of reality, one which at the very least can distinguish the whole from a part. Women’s History, the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in women, is providing the body of experience against which new theory can be tested and the ground on which women of vision can stand.
A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a new world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.
Dr. Gail Dines is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Wheelock College in Boston. She’s the author of multiple books and articles, and has been described as the world’s leading expert on the effects of pornography.
She’s the author of the highly acclaimed Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Beacon Press); and co-editor of Gender, Race, and Class in Media. Translated into four languages, Pornland is the basis of a documentary released this fall by Media Education Foundation.
Dr Dines is president and CEO of Culture Reframed, a non-profit organization composed of academics, professionals and activists from a wide range of perspectives, that is dedicated to raising public awareness about the impact of pornography on children, youth and adults. If you want to know much more about her work, you can go to her website, www.gaildines.com.
“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.” —Derrick Jensen
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Deep Green Resistance is a radical environmental movement, dedicated to shifting activists towards strategies that have a real chance to stop the murder of the planet. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the land around us; we fight for the salmon, the pine trees, and the songbirds, not the solar panels and space shuttles so many ‘environmentalists’ have fallen in love with. We in DGR don’t want a more sustainable nightmare. We want a living world.
Deep Green Resistance recognizes that industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet – and when our way of living conflicts with the needs of the land, our way of living must go. This transition to a healthy and just relationship with the natural world is a massive undertaking, one that won’t be achieved with individual lifestyle changes and a green coat of paint on the latest mountain-killing mining rig. Real change will take a revolutionary heart. Anything less is a recipe for failure.
Deep Green Resistance has a roadmap for that revolution. We call it Decisive Ecological Warfare. We’ve studied the most successful movements in history, from the Irish Republicans to Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, and applied the lessons they can teach us to the fight for Earth liberation. Our goal as aboveground activists is to promote this strategic resistance, with the goal of triggering cascading systems failure within industrial infrastructure. In this mission, we are guided by a strict code of conduct, a steering committee of seasoned revolutionaries, and, most of all, an unwavering dedication to the land on which we live.
HOW CAN I HELP?
In the midst of all this destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But there’s one nice thing about living in such dark times – anywhere you look, there’s great work to be done. Deep Green Resistance isn’t afraid to make the connections between open-pit mining and police brutality, between rape and deforestation, between acidified oceans and settler colonialism. We are proud anti-capitalists, anti-racists, and radical feminists, with members working on everything from pornography and prostitution to indigenous land rights and prison reform.
Whether on the front lines or behind the scenes, there is room for you in this war. So get in touch! We have members across the globe and resources in multiple languages. Head to our website, check our Facebook, or send us an email and introduce yourself. We’ll help you learn more about DGR, find opportunities for volunteering, and apply for greater involvement. You’ll also be able to download a free ebook copy of the Deep Green Resistance book.
DGR is working to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. In order to succeed, we’ll need teachers, healers, warriors, and workers. If you’re tired of the false solutions and the feel-good failures, Deep Green Resistance is for you, whatever your skills. In a fight like this, we need it all.
Remember: Deep Green Resistance is an aboveground organization, meaning we don’t engage in violence or property destruction. If you feel your talents would best be put to use in more militant actions, please do not contact us. This will keep you safer, and help us be more effective. We will not answer any questions related to any underground that may or may not exist.
“Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
Editors Note: This essay by Deep Green Resistance co-founder Lierre Keith was originally published on the DGR News Service in August 2015 under the title, “The Girls and the Grasses.” We think it an exceptional piece, and would like to share it again. [Photo by Max Wilbert, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.]
by Lierre Keith
Captured in a test tube, blood may look like a static liquid, but it’s alive, as animate and intelligent as the rest of you. It also makes up a great deal of you: of your 50 trillion cells, one-quarter are red blood cells. Two million are born every second. On their way to maturation, red blood cells jettison their nuclei―their DNA, their capacity to divide and repair. They have no future, only a task: to carry the hemoglobin that will hold your oxygen. They don’t use the oxygen themselves–they only transport it. This they do with exquisite precision, completing a cycle of circulation through your body every twenty seconds for a hundred days. Then they die.
The core of hemoglobin is a molecule of iron. It’s the iron that grasps the oxygen at the surface of your lungs, hangs on through the rush of blood, then releases it to wanting cells. If iron goes missing, the body, as ever, has a fallback plan. It adds more water to increase blood volume; thin blood travels faster through the fine capillaries. Do more with less.
All good except there’s less and less oxygen offered to the cells. Another plan kicks in: increased cardiac output. The heart ups its stroke volume and its rate. To keep you from exploding, the brain joins in, sending signals to the muscles enfolding each blood vessel, telling them to relax. Now blood volume can increase with blood pressure stable.
But still no iron arrives. At this point, the other organs have to cooperate, giving up blood flow to protect the brain and heart. The skin makes major sacrifices, which is why anemics are known for their pallor. Symptoms perceived by the person―you―will probably increase as your tissues, and then organs, begin to starve.
If there is no relief, ultimately all the plans will fail. Even a strong heart can only strain for so long. Blood backs up into the capillaries. Under the pressure, liquid seeps out into surrounding tissues. You are now swelling and you don’t know why. Then the lungs are breached. The alveoli, the tiny sacs that await the promise of air, stiffen from the gathering flood. It doesn’t take much. The sacs fill with fluid. Your body is drowning itself. This is called pulmonary edema, and you are in big trouble.
I know this because it happened to me. Uterine fibroids wrung a murder scene from me every month; the surgery to remove them pushed me across the red cell Rubicon. I knew nothing: my body understood and responded. My eyes swelled, then my ankles, my calves. Then I couldn’t breathe. Then it hurt to breathe. I finally stopped taking advice from my dog―Take a nap! With me!–and dragged myself to the ER, where, eventually, all was revealed.
Two weeks later, the flood had subsided, absorbed back into some wetland tissue of my body, and I felt the absence of pain as a positive. Breathing was exquisite, the sweetest thing I could imagine. Every moment of effortless air was all I could ever want. I knew it would fade and I would forget. But for a few days, I was alive. And it was good.
Our bodies are both all we have and everything we could want. We are alive and we get to be alive. There is joy on the surface of the skin waiting for sunlight and soft things (both of which produce endorphins, so yes: joy). There is the constant, stalwart sound of our hearts. Babies who are carried against their mothers’ hearts learn to breathe better than those who aren’t. There is the strength of bone and the stretch of muscle and their complex coordination. We are a set of electrical impulses inside a watery environment: how? Well, the nerves that conduct the impulses are sheathed by a fatty substance called myelin―they’re insulated. This permits “agile communication between distant body parts.” Understand this: it’s all alive, it all communicates, it makes decisions, and it knows what it’s doing. You can’t possibly fathom its intricacies. To start to explore the filigree of brain, synapse, nerve, and muscle is to know that even the blink of your eyes is a miracle.
Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddes of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time , we knew we were alive. And it was good.
__________
And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell.
Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.
Necrophilia is the end point of sadism. The sadistic urge is about control–“the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being,” as Fromm defined it. The objective of inflicting pain and degradation is to break a human being. Pain is always degrading; victimization humiliates; eventually, everyone breaks. The power to do that is the sadist’s dream. And who could be more broken to your control than a woman who can’t walk?
Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven-year-old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with its 8,000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of FGM, the labia are cut off and the vagina sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl’s husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.
You don’t do this to a human being. You do it to an object. That much is true. But there is more. Because the world is full of actual objects—cardboard boxes and abandoned cars—and men don’t spend their time torturing those. They know we aren’t objects, that we have nerves that feel and flesh that bruises. They know we have nowhere else to go when they lay claim to our bodies. That’s where the sadist finds his pleasure: pain produces suffering, humiliation perhaps more, and if he can inflict that on her, it’s absolute proof of his control.
Behind the sadists are the institutions, the condensations of power, that hand us to him. Every time a judge rules that women have no right to bodily integrity—that upskirt photos are legal, that miscarriages are murder, that women should expect to be beaten—he wins. Every time the Fashion Masters make heels higher and clothes smaller, he smiles. Every time an entire class of women—the poorest and most desperate, at the bottom of every conceivable hierarchy—are declared legal commodities for sex, he gets a collective hard-on. Whether he personally uses any such women is beside the point. Society has ruled they are there for him, other men have ensured their compliance, and they will comply. He can kill one—the ultimate sex act for the sadist—and no one will notice. And no one does.
There is no stop to this, no natural endpoint. There is always another sentient, self-willed being to inflame his desire to control, so the addiction is forever fed. With other addictions, the addict bottoms out, his life becomes unmanageable, and the stark choice is stop or die. But the sadist isn’t hurting himself. There’s no looming bottom to hit, only an endless choice of victims, served up by the culture. Women are the feast at our own funeral, and he is happy to feed.
_____
If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: no. “No” is a boundary, spoken only by a self who claims one. Objects have neither; subjects begin at no. Feminists said no and we meant it.
The boundary of “no” extended outward, an insult to one being an injury to all: “we” is the word of political movements. Without it, women are cast adrift in a hostile, chaotic sea, holding our breath against the next Bad Thing. With the lens of feminism, the chaos snaps into sharp focus. We gave words to the Bad Things, then faced down denial and despair to see the pattern. That’s called theory. Then we demanded remedies. That’s what subjects, especially political subjects, do. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragettes, worked at the Census Office as a birth registrar. Every day, young girls came in with their newborns. Every day, she had to ask who the father was, and every day the girls wept in humiliation and rage. Reader, you know who the fathers were. That’s why Pankhurst never gave up.
To say no to the sadist is to assert those girls as political subjects, as human beings with the standing that comes from inalienable rights. Each and every life is self-willed and sovereign; each life can only be lived in a body. Not an object to be broken down for parts: a living body. Child sexual abuse is especially designed to turn the body into a cage. The bars may start as terror and pain but they will harden to self-loathing. Instilling shame is the best method to ensure compliance: we are ashamed—sexual violation is very good at that—and for the rest of our lives we will comply. Our compliance is, of course, his control. His power is his pleasure, and another generation of girls will grow up in bodies they will surely hate, to be women who comply.
_______
What has been done to our bodies has been done to our planet. The sadist exerts his control; the necrophiliac turns the living into the dead. The self-willed and the wild are their targets and their necrotic project is almost complete.
Taken one by one, the facts are appalling. In my lifetime, the earth has lost half her wildlife. Every day, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. “Ocean” is synonymous with the words abundance and plenty. Fullness is on the list, as well as infinity. And by 2048, the oceans will be empty of fish. Crustaceans are experiencing “complete reproductive failure.” In plain terms, their babies are dying. Plankton are also disappearing. Maybe plankton are too small and green for anyone to care about, but know this: two out of three animal breaths are made possible by the oxygen plankton produce. If the oceans go down, we go down with them.
How could it be otherwise? See the pattern, not just the facts. There were so many bison on the Great Plains, you could sit and watch for days as a herd thundered by. In the central valley of California, the flocks of waterbirds were so thick they blocked out the sun. One-quarter of Indiana was a wetland, lush with life and the promise of more. Now it’s a desert of corn. Where I live in the pacific northwest, ten million fish have been reduced to ten thousand. People would hear them coming for a whole day. This is not a story: there are people alive who remember it. And I have never once heard the sound that water makes when forty million years of persistence finds it way home. Am I allowed to use the word “apocalypse” yet?
The necrophiliac insists we are mechanical components, that rivers are an engineering project, and genes can be sliced up and arranged at whim. He believes we are all machines, despite the obvious: a machine can be taken apart and put back together. A living being can’t. May I add: neither can a living planet.
Understand where the war against the world began. In seven places around the globe, humans took up the activity called agriculture. In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, and then you plant it to human use. Instead of sharing that land with the other million creatures who need to live there, you’re only growing humans on it. It’s biotic cleansing. The human population grows to huge numbers; everyone else is driven into extinction.
Agriculture creates a way of life called civilization. Civilization means people living in cities. What that means is: they need more than the land can give. Food, water, energy have to come from someplace else. It doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide. Because no one willing gives up their land, their water, their trees. But since the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. That’s the last 10,000 years in a few sentences.
The end of every civilization is written into the beginning. Agriculture destroys the world. That’s not agriculture on a bad day. That’s what agriculture is. You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil. Civilizations last between 800 and maybe 2,000 years—they last until the soil gives out.
What could be more sadistic then control of entire continents? He turns mountains into rubble, and rivers must do as they are told. The basic unit of life is violated with genetic engineering. The basic unit of matter as well, to make bombs that kill millions. This is his passion, turning the living into the dead. It’s not just individual deaths and not even the deaths of species. The process of life itself is now under assault and it is losing badly. Vertebrate evolution has long since come to a halt—there isn’t enough habitat left. There are areas in China where there are no flowering plants. Why? Because the pollinators are all dead. That’s five hundred million years of evolution: gone.
He wants it all dead. That’s his biggest thrill and the only way he can control it. According to him it was never alive. There is no self-willed community, no truly wild land. It’s all inanimate components he can arrange to this liking, a garden he can manage. Never mind that every land so managed has been lessened into desert. The essential integrity of life has been breached, and now he claims it never existed. He can do whatever he wants. And no one stops him.
__________
Can we stop him?
I say yes, but then I have no intention of giving up. The facts as they stand are unbearable, but it’s only in facing them that pattern comes clear. Civilization is based on drawdown. It props itself up with imperialism, conquering its neighbors and stripping their land, but eventually even the colonies wear out. Fossil fuel has been an accelerant, as has capitalism, but the underlying problem is much bigger than either. Civilization requires agriculture, and agriculture is a war against the living world. Whatever good was in the culture before, ten thousand years of that war has turned it necrotic.
But what humans do they can stop doing. Granted every institution is headed in the wrong direction, there’s no material reason the destruction must continue. The reason is political: the sadist is rewarded, and rewarded well. Most leftists and environmentalists see that. What they don’t see is the central insight of radical feminism: his pleasure in domination.
The real brilliance of patriarchy is right here: it doesn’t just naturalize oppression, it sexualizes acts of oppression. It eroticizes domination and subordination and then institutionalizes them into masculinity and femininity. Men become real men by breaking boundaries—the sexual boundaries of women and children, the cultural and political boundaries of indigenous people, the biological boundaries of rivers and forests, the genetic boundaries of other species, and the physical boundaries of the atom itself. The sadist is rewarded with money and power, but he also gets a sexual thrill from dominating. And the end of the world is a mass circle jerk of autoerotic asphyxiation.
The real brilliance of feminism is that we figured that out.
What has to happen to save our planet is simple: stop the war. If we just get out of the way, life will return because life wants to live. The forests and prairies will find their way back. Every dam will fail, every cement channel, and the rivers will ease their sorrows and meet the ocean again. The fish will know what to do. In being eaten, they feed the forest, which protects the rivers, which makes a home for more salmon. This is not the death of destruction but the death of participation that makes the world whole.
Sometimes there are facts that require all the courage we have in our hearts. Here is one. Carbon has breached 400 ppm. For life to continue, that carbon needs to get back into the ground. And so we come to grasses.
Where the world is wet, trees make forests. Where it’s dry, the grasses grow. Grasslands endure extreme heat in summer and vicious cold in winter. Grasses survive by keeping 80 percent of their bodies underground, in the form of roots. Those roots are crucial to the community of life. They provide physical channels for rain to enter the soil. They can reach down fifteen feet and bring up minerals from the rocks below, minerals that every living creature needs. They can build soil at an extraordinary rate. The base material they use to make soil is carbon. Which means the grasses are our only hope to get that carbon out of the sky.
And they will do it if we let them. If we could repair 75 percent of the world’s grasslands—destroyed by the war of agriculture—in under fifteen years, the grasses would sequester all the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the industrial age. Read that again if you need to. Then take it with you wherever you go. Tell it to anyone who will listen. There is still a chance.
The grasses can’t do it alone. No creature exists independent of all others. Repairing the grasslands means restoring the ruminants. In the hot, dry summer, life goes dormant on the surface of the soil. It’s the ruminants who keep the nutrient cycle moving. They carry an ecosystem inside themselves, especially the bacteria that digests cellulose. When a bison grazes, she’s not actually eating the grass. She’s feeding it to her bacteria. The bacteria eat the grass and then she eats the bacteria. Her wastes then water and fertilize the grasses. And the circle is complete.
The grasslands have been eradicated for agriculture, to grow cereal grains for people. Because I want to restore the grasses, I get accused of wanting to kill six billion people. That’s not a random number. In 1800, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, there were one billion people. Now there are seven billion. Six billion are only here because of fossil fuel. Eating a non-renewable resource was never a plan with a future. Yet pointing that out somehow makes me a mass murderer.
Start with the obvious. Nothing we do at these numbers is sustainable. Ninety-eight percent of the old-growth forests and 99 percent of the grasslands are gone, and gone with them was most of the soil they built. There’s nothing left to take. The planet has been skinned alive.
Add to that: all civilizations end in collapse. All of them. How could it be otherwise if your way of life relies on destroying the place you live? The soil is gone and the oil is running out. By avoiding the facts, we are ensuring it will end in the worst possible way.
We can do better than mass starvation, failed states, ethnic strife, misogyny, petty warlords, and the dystopian scenarios that collapse brings. It’s very simple: reproduce at less than replacement numbers. The problem will take care of itself. And now we come to the girls.
What drops the birthrate universally is raising the status of women. Very specifically, the action with the greatest impact is teaching a girl to read. When women and girls have even that tiny bit of power over their lives, they choose to have fewer children. Yes, women need birth control, but what we really need is liberty. Around the world, women have very little control over how men use our bodies. Close to half of all pregnancies are unplanned or unwanted. Pregnancy is the second leading cause of death for girls age 15-19. Not much has changed since Emmeline Pankhurst refused to give up.
We should be defending the human rights of girls because girls matter. As it turns out, the basic rights of girls are crucial to the survival of the planet.
Can we stop him?
Yes, but only if we understand what we’re up against.
He wants the world dead. Anything alive must be replaced by something mechanical. He prefers gears, pistons, circuits to soft animal bodies, even his own. He hopes to upload himself into a computer some day.
He wants the world dead. He enjoys making it submit. He’s erected giant cities where once were forests. Concrete and asphalt tame the unruly.
He wants the world dead. Anything female must be punished, permanently. The younger they are, the sooner they break. So he starts early.
A war against your body is a war against your life. If he can get us to fight the war for him, we’ll never be free. But we said every woman’s body was sacred. And we meant it, too. Every creature has her own physical integrity, an inviolable whole. It’s a whole too complex to understand, even as we live inside it. I had no idea why my eyes were swelling and my lungs were aching. The complexities of keeping me alive could never be left to me.
One teaspoon of soil contains a million living creatures. One tiny scoop of life and it’s already more complex than we could ever understand. And he thinks he can manage oceans?
We’re going to have to match his contempt with our courage. We’re going to have to match his brute power with our fierce and fragile dreams. And we’re going to have to match his bottomless sadism with a determination that will not bend and will not break and will not stop.
And if we can’t do it for ourselves, we have to do it for the girls.
Whatever you love, it is under assault. Love is a verb. May that love call us to action.
Lierre Keith is the author of six books. Visit her website at www.lierrekeith.com
This essay first appeared August 8, 2015 on RadFem Repost.
Hilla Kerner joined Vancouver Rape Relief thirteen years ago. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the longest standing rape crisis centre in Canada. Since 1973, the group who is self organized as a collective has responded to close to 46,000 women seeking support in their escape from male violence. Since they opened their transition house in 1981, they have housed over 3,000 women and over 2,600 children.
They serve 1200 women a year, and house roughly 100 women fleeing violence at any given time. Many of the women they service are poor, indigenous, and have been prostituted. Vancouver Rape Relief is sustained by grassroots donations. You can donate to the organization here.
This interview with Hilla Kerner took place on May 26, 2019, on Derrick Jensen‘s radio show “Resistance Radio,” which is broadcast on the Progressive Radio Network.
Derrick Jensen is a coauthor of Deep Green Resistance, and the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, A Language Older than Words, and many other books. He was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” and won the Eric Hoffer Award in 2008. He has written for Orion, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine, among many others.
Resistance Radio covers ecology and feminist themes. Episodes can be found on YouTube or browse all of the interviews in our Resistance Radio archive.
Hilla Kerner can also be found on Twitter, where she is outspoken on issues of poverty, destruction of the planet, and violence against women.
or the resource is iron ore, copper, gold, coal, oil, gas, or sand taken from the land, taken from indigenous cultures and the poor for corporations and the rich people who run them…
or the resource is fresh clean water and fresh clean air, taken from us all by corporations to use as the dumping ground for their pollution, as commerce reigns supreme and supreme courts grant corporations more rights than people.
All Oppression is Connected. All Oppression is Related to Resource Extraction.
Image: All Oppression is Connected is a wall painting by Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu, inspired by the poetry of Jamaican artist Staceyann Chin. Labeled for noncommerical reuse on baldiri Flickr.
About Deep Green Resistance
DGR is a political movement for liberation and revolution. We aim for nothing less than total liberation from extractive economics, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, industrialism, and the culture of empire that we call civilization. This is a war for survival, and we’re losing. We aim to turn the tide. We mean to win.
And we’re recruiting. DGR is building an international movement dedicated to grassroots revolutionary change. Anyone can contribute: we need warriors, poets, writers, organizers, workers, mothers, thinkers, students, farmers. We need you.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, a group of radical women are about to speak in the middle of a crowd at the assembly “Ni Una Menos” (Not one more woman) that took place anticipating preparations for the coming March 8th, you can listen to the noise and a unison shout against them to “go away!”
There is a man standing beside them yelling with a defying fighting pose, pointing at them aggressively. He is dressed in a plaid miniskirt and white shirt. He is far taller than the average women present.
From the multitude of radical women that are preparing to speak, a woman with a calm expression appears, she wears a black blouse and short hair, asks for the microphone: “Freedom of speech, female partners, freedom of speech”!
Her name is Ana; she knows she is unwelcome, as are her partners from FRIA/Feministas Radicales Independientes de Argentina (Independent Radical Feminists of Argentina) and RADAR Feministas Radicales de Argentina (Radical Feminists of Argentina). They are attending what they thought was a democratic assembly to present their abolitionist stance against sexual exploitation. The man dressed in a miniskirt, who hasn´t stopped threatening them through shouts and flinging fists in the air, throws himself over her to take away the microphone.
Surrounding women stopped him and took him away. They defend themselves. A woman wearing a yellow jacket stands out and drives him away vehemently. She is thin and short in contrast to him. You can see in her face the fury for survival, the rage of knowing she is being invaded, and the rest of the radical women act with her. You can see many women stopping the hands of the man. They know he is a man, even though he claims vocally to be otherwise. He has invaded them and they stop him.
In a feminist assembly, women would take out the violent man in a shout for self-defense, protecting the women being harassed. Very likely, they would make a complaint to set a criminal record against a potential woman-killer and would continue talking about immediate and future security for harassed women, and all women.
But this does not happen. It is February 15, 2019. Three decades ago feminism, in the dawn of neoliberalism, changed from being about and for women to caring for aggressors and covering up pimps—in general, to protect men. Because of this, harassed women are forced to abandon the venue, being booed by the public. Nobody will protect them or even consider their safety. Nobody but themselves will take a stance against that violence; they will withdraw, scared, hurt, damaged by the support that other women gave (in a self-proclaimed feminist assembly) to a man harassing women. I found the name of the name of that woman in social media, who, in spite of the hooting crowd, came out to speak calmly before being physically attacked. Her name is Ana Marcocavallo, 43 years old, psychologist and professor in pedagogy. She lives in Buenos Aires and is a radical feminist who forms part of FRIA/Feministas Radicales Independientes de Argentina, we had a phone interview and chatted.
I´ve read what happened, are you okay?
At the moment it was quite terrible, emotionally, physically and politically…
Did you attend as member of a group?
I am part of an organization called FRIA, but at that moment various groups attended, FRIA, RADAR, Abolicionistas Independientes (Independent Abolitionists), and if I’m correct, Mujeres Autoconvocadas (Self-summoned Women) among many.
I followed the typical path many do to feminism, arriving through mainstream feminism, liberal feminism. I got to radical feminism fairly recently, only four or five years ago, which was due to fellow feminists who taught me, who gave me readings, which honestly, I read reluctantly. In that way I discovered a new world where I felt that all the ideas I had myself, and which I discarded as wrong, had a place and there were more people who thought like I did.
How has it been to organize as Radicals?
Honestly, it was difficult. At the beginning there were many radicals spread afar, placard radicals [closet radicals] so to say. It was important to find each other as fellow mates, first with small groups to then realize that these groups grew or that other small groups, with which we could coordinate, existed. But by small groups I´m talking of very small groups. For example, some groups from a whole province would only have two members. Currently, we are organized through a WhatsApp group of Radical Feminists from different provinces and the capital, from different gathering groups, a little of everything, and through that group we are discussing things, organizing, generating a tighter Radical Feminist nucleus. At least now we know others are around, even though we might not agree on all our contents.
Through social media we are in contact with radical feminists from México, Uruguay, Paraguay, Spain, US, UK… and we can see that in those countries they are living the same as we are, an advance of Liberal Feminism, which is made up of a combination of ideas like Queer Theory, transactivism and legalization of prostitution, things you won’t see in other countries. I believe that in Argentina, we live a weird case, other countries have told us, where people who are trans, drags and transactivists are also prostitution abolitionists, which you will never find in other countries.
This is how historical reality is marking us through “transfeminines” who have been building the abolitionist movement, who have left us with disputable laws regarding gender definitions, but what I believe is that these theories go hand in hand, prostitution legalization is leading transactivism and Queer Theory, who breaking a split within the abolitionist movement.
The fact that some people with radical ideas who were also trans or drags or that reified that identity, generated a kind of strategic unit where feminist women that preceded us renounced to some matters. For example, the Ley de Identidad de Género (Gender Identity Law) in Argentina, which turned out to be an incredibly deceitful law.
Why an assembly called “Ni Una Menos” (Not one more woman) has among their members people that favor sexual exploitation and are pro-transactivism?
Precisely, it is paradoxical. Basically, the problem lies in that Ni Una Menos in Argentina is in favor of legalizing prostitution and adopts a Liberal Feminist stance. As such, us abolitionists, we fight for our spaces and are being cornered, to the point we do not know if it is convenient for us to go after those particular spaces or try to generate new ones.
How does the phenomenon of the Green Wave and these last happenings relate?
The Green Wave is specifically a fight for legal abortion, for it to be safe and free. What happens within feminism is the occurrence of strategic units, where we are united by basic principles but differentiated by others. In this case, the Green Wave has such populous numbers because all sectors offer support, pro-legal prostitution, abolitionists of prostitution, Radical Feminists and Liberal Feminists.
That does not happen in Mexico, we never prefer to march next to Liberal Feminists under any circumstance….
Of course, what happens is that just by numbers, Radical Feminists cannot lose the chance to march with them but we march separately. It is like throwing wood to a fire, it does us no good, politically speaking, because in this moment we are being isolated, followed and threatened by liberal feminism, the kind of feminism that does not think like we do, which means, the greater majority.
What would you say to a feminist in the effort of understanding what transactivism is?
Transactivism is difficult to explain, but what we dispute is not the existence of trans people—we are not in favor of the annihilation of trans people, what we are accused here in Argentina, where we get compared with Nazis—but that our struggles can converge in some point. Meanwhile in other points, when they oppose radically against feminism, we will never accept them passively as machismo has always imposed over us women.
And those matters are the redefinition of what being a woman, where we are not allowed to define ourselves as women, which is what patriarchy has always done, it has told us “women are that which are not men,” and now it turns out that we are “cis-women,” the “women that are not trans,” that is what we are discussing now.
We argue against the current definition of gender, from the transactivism vantage, it is defined as “identity.” We have a vision of gender as oppression, oppression by material causes, not merely ideological. From transactivism’s vantage point, gender is the cause of oppression. We think that gender itself is the oppression. These theoretical differences are interpreted by transactivism as a denial of their identity, but basically it is a tautology to believe that “women are women,” that “women’s day is women’s day.”
We do not deny their existence, nor their struggle or problems. What we deny is that their problems comingle with ours, to have our spaces colonized, and of course, that they hetero-define us, which is to say, that we cannot define ourselves by ourselves, because that erases us as political subjects, and if women are troubled by something, it goes beyond countries and specific problems, and it is precisely that we are women and that we have particular pains and pangs for being born with determined genitals.
Drawing by Amanda Dziurza
And how would you explain abolitionism?
For me, abolitionism was one of the gateways to radical feminism. Radical Feminism is abolitionist by nature, however, not all abolitionists are Radical Feminists, because to begin with, not all abolitionists are feminists. It is a weird phenomenon, but that is how reality works.
Abolitionist feminisms, as I understand it, is the feminism that opposes rape culture and prostitution culture. Prostitution is seen as rape; simultaneously, pornography is understood as the educational method for prostitution and rape.
We are accused for being against the prostitution system, meant as normalization of men’s will and capacity to do to women’s bodies whatever they wish to, privately, through marriage, or publicly, through any other media or means, rape for pay, is that we are moving against prostituted women and their rights, which is false, a fallacy, a misrepresentation. In the same way as radical feminists, we are against a definition of gender by transactivism. And we are accused of being against trans people, the cause of their sufferings, their murders, and so on, which ignores that the perpetrators are men and not us feminists.
Under this stance it is that the assembly Ni Una Menos, asked you to present ourselves as an abolitionist block rather than Radical Feminists.
I asked him to present us as cold, RADAR, nothing more, and they present us as radical feminists, so right there the situation that will not let us talk arises, encouraged by Georgina Orellano who shouted at us “TERFs, TERFs, TERFs!” Georgina as you know is the most visible faces of AMMAR, which is the group that carries out regulationism, the pro-pimping.
It wasn´t that long ago that I saw some member of AMMAR with legal complaints for prostitution…
They have complaints for prostitution and even several of them remain under legal process. And precisely, many of the stances they present themselves with is to attack the Anti-Prostitution Law that has taken us so many years to obtain. One of our requirements is that the Anti-Prostitution Law is inviolable.
And even when they are marked by prostitution complaints they still receive support?
Yes, because there is a lot of misrepresentation going on, extortive appeals to the feminine socialization that we must embrace at all costs, we feel guilt that we are the sole root cause, we feel guilt to have exclusive spaces, so we have to adhere to all other causes, because otherwise, it will be our fault they are discriminated, it is our fault they suffer. Dialogue is channeled that way.
So you get up there to speak with other fellows of the assembly Ni Una Menos…
There were many of us, we were eight women, they snatched the microphone from my hands, and started chanting so that we would not be allowed to speak. There were some women asking “let them speak, I am not in agreement with them, but they must have the right to speak,” at some point I got the microphone back. The turmoil was loud, and I stepped ahead and shouted “Freedom of speech, women, freedom of speech!” so that I could read my plea and following me my fellow team from RADAR their own pleads. At that moment, I´m not sure to say if it was or not a transfeminine, or a person self-considered binary, I can´t tell, but he started an attack against me which was stopped by my friends.
Practically, he threw himself to punch you, did he hit you?
Luckily no, first he grabbed me by my t-shirt neck and supposedly was trying to snatch the microphone with the other hand, but he had the attitude that he was about to punch me, so I pushed him backwards. I swear, I reconstruct the moment through the videos from all perspectives, because honestly at that moment a fellow woman mate grabbed him from his back and pulled him, and from what I see, he also throws punches against her, that luckily don’t reach her, because surely because other people from other groups were transactivists, recognized his strength and threw him to the ground. It seems to me of extreme severity that the whole assembly shouted supporting support for transactivism after a women or many might have been punched. And it is incredibly severe that, not only he attacked me, but that he tried to punch a minor.
After this moment, what happened? Did you leave?
After this this moment in the assembly there were many people that tried to intervene for us, so that we had our right to speak, some fellow members would dissuade me, “come on, come on” but I said “no, we will stay, we will not go down.” Many people intervened, but told us, “no, there is no solution.” A representative of Ni Una Menos, took the microphone, spoke instead of us, against us. Georgina Orellano also spoke against us asking that we should not get the microphone, that we should not be allowed to speak. They insisted that we left, I said again no, that we would speak, and well, the third time my fellow members told me to leave, realized there was no solution, not to say that the supposedly democratic assembly was expelling us, and that we needed security because there were women, some very young, minors, and nobody listened. It could have gone much worse. When we left, we did it alone, by ourselves with very young members, but nobody of NUM guarded our security, and there was no communique, nobody talked about it, it was made invisible. This got to social media by our own complaints.
I read that the comments that insulted the radicals were directed mostly against young women, was this so?
No, liberals are also very young. Last year a historical feminist of abolitionism called Raquel Diselfeld was among the few that were with us in the middle of the turmoil. For example, she talked on the assembly of sexual liberty for women, pleasure, orgasms, she talked about how this has nothing to do with prostitution and she was booed by a bunch of girls who were not even yet born when this woman was already fighting for our rights, which means, that not only young feminists are in radical feminism, they are in all kinds, and fortunately the youngest of them are mobilized by general feminism, radical and liberal feminism. It is a time when young women are acquiring a level of consciousness that when we were of their young age didn’t have.
When you attended the assembly of Ni Una Menos could you foresee the attack?
We did foresee that something like this could occur. We always remain optimists, to strive for the best, that is to say, that we would be prevented from speaking and that we would have to withdraw.
During this week and the previous one, a kind of social media war was held against us, where many venues published notes that I consider terrible apologies for crime; for example, a news server called Página 12, asked for organizations that are contrary to radical feminism or that don’t manifest any posture, to abandon their tepidness and attack us.
And during these two or three weeks many articles of political parties misrepresented our posture and in social media there were many attacks and threats, even to set us on fire or break the teeth of radical feminists.
One always takes it with good spirit, the things that happen on the internet, everybody blathers on social media, but nobody is direct. I would at least consider that there would be somebody that would consider it literally and in effect that was what happened. We tried to get there the most possibly organized in our security to avoid this kind of things, but we did not expect that it would spread with such virulence and particularly, with such approval from organizations like Ni Una Menos as did the rest of the assembly.
Did you know the aggressor? Had he threatened you before?
I did not know him, but some members of RADAR noticed that this person was taking pictures of them.
So, how did you feel? How do you feel now?
Honestly, what I think now is I’m glad it did not escalate, it could’ve been much worse, I could’ve been injured if it wouldn’t have been for the intervention of my fellow companions that exposed themselves way too much, but it didn’t get any worse by miracle.
At this moment, I am hurt, emotionally fatigued, very tired, in this moment I feel personal desolation because the whole abolitionist block to which we belong, is not repudiating a violent physical action against a fellow woman, even though it would have or not been me. It establishes a very serious precedent that we do not repudiate a violent action against a woman in spaces that should be safe, we are seen as hate speech, meanwhile we would never intend or even occur to punch a person, trans or transactivist or woman transactivist, queer or even women against women’s rights, like those that are against legalizing abortion. We have never done it and never will, what we have suffered are threats and physical violence.
Let me understand you, liberal feminists have not repudiated the violence, but neither abolitionists have positioned themselves against the violence you lived through?
A letter for general repudiation has been prepared, and it has been signed by too few, the majority of signatures come from radical feminists, we are helping ourselves, but we are not having the slightest help of the Argentinian abolitionist block, we are receiving support from the rest of the world, as I said, US, UK, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile … but basically in Argentina we are not receiving enough support, and that truly breaks my heart.
What is your analysis of this situation?
I believe that the general objective of the attack was an excuse for legalization of prostitution adherents to blame radical feminists of breaking the abolitionist block, just as is happening now. There is a part of abolitionism that does not want to be related with our posture. We are not telling them to adhere to our posture, but simply to repudiate the physical attack.
It seems like bullying in school, a boy bullies another boy and there is a reaction of the bystanders like a great public that also engages in a passive way, because that way they avoid being the attack target. I believe the situation is like this or at least I understand it this way.
Regarding yourself, what follows next? How are you coping with all of this?
I am currently keeping out of the streets for a week, I need protection, I won’t go out with other people, at least for a week. There are actions I cannot participate in, for example next Tuesday there will be a meeting pro-choice to which I will not be able to go, so that my face is not recognized and to avoid other situations. As I said before, I work in institutions of pedagogy sponsored by the city government. So if I say something or they say I said something against the Gender Identity Law (which states that any person has the gender with which they themselves self-designate, without any other norm or explanation, simply put, I call myself a man and I am a man, I do not even have to change my dress code), the situation would be dangerous for me, I could lose my job.
I had to go through something like that, some transfeminine summoned men to find my address and attack me, luckily they didn’t, but I understand, it is a tough situation, a hard emotional punch…
Exactly, it’s a situation to fear, if you really have to yield to getting silenced.
It is a tactic of these people, I believe we have to take some time for ourselves, but what they can’t predict is that we continue in dialogue with other women.
I believe that all we can do is create alternative spaces and to continue honest theory and spread it, but by some way it is as if we were mute, the prejudice is so big that we will not be heard.
Editor’s note: Feminist Current’s Raquel Rosario Sanchez also interviewed two members of (FRIA), Maira and Ana; read this interview here.
