Two hundred species went extinct today. The last individual from each of these 200 species dies each day. Merely fifteen years ago, that number was 150. While extinctions are a natural process, the scale of the current mass extinction is a direct result of industrial civilization. In this article, Rebecca writes about her grief for all her lost kins, and about some groups who are actively working to save some of the remaining ones.
Hearing the last song of a male Kauai ‘O’o tears me up. He was singing for a female who will never come. Now his lovely voice is gone too. I cry for him, and for all the species we have lost. First listed as endangered in 1967, the Kauai ‘O’o lived in the forests of Kaua’i, and was extinct 20 years later, after their habitat was destroyed by human activity.
One in a million species expires naturally each year, but now extinctions are happening 1,000 times faster. Humans are driving species extinct more rapidly than ever before in the history of the planet. Since the dawn of industrial civilization, we have lost eighty-three percent of wild mammals and fifty percent of plants, and a million more species are at risk —all largely as a result of human actions.
Everywhere there is life, there is song.
The planet is always singing. Humans are meant to live in sync, our unique note resounding within the symphony. Instead, our dominant culture is killing all the other voices, one by one, as if removing instruments from an orchestra. Some birds have forgotten their song, like the once abundant regent honeyeater. Now critically endangered, they are unable to find other honeyeaters and hear their songs.
The world needs the bitter and resonant cry of every creature, even our own deep voices, attuning with the song of the world. As a wilderness and soul guide, I invite people to listen to the voices of all the others and remember their own unique notes, the mythic purpose of their souls. I was made for this work. Yet it is not enough to stop the destruction of the last remaining wild species.
Whistling
Did the Kauai ‘O’o know he was calling out to an empty world? “The costs of civilization are too high,” his song pierces me. “Remember the connection we once had.” The first human words sounded like birds. Humans and birds evolved from a common ancestor, a reptile millions of years ago. Both grew to form complex vocalizations and social groups. Rare whistling languages, often called bird languages, used to be found all over the world. The truest voices of our ancestors, they are now heard only in a handful of places with scattered settlements or mountainous terrain.
In south-western Costa Rica, I lived amongst the Guaymi people in rustic dwellings, eating home-grown rice and beans in banana leaves. We taught each other, in Spanish, our first languages. When the Guaymi whistled to each other, the sound traveled a great distance through the rainforest. They looked beautiful with their heads and bodies vibrating, faces and lips moving wildly to form the unusual sounds.
In the foothills of the Himalayas, the Hmong people speak in whistles. In their courtship rituals, now rarely-performed, boys would wander through nearby villages at nightfall, whistling poetry. If a girl responded, the dialogue would continue. The lovers added nonsense syllables to assure the secrecy of their melody.
Longing
“Is anyone alive out there?” the Kauai ‘O’o sings, but there is no reply, nor will there ever be again. Is he sorrowful? That is what I feel when I sense what is happening and read things like of all the mammals now on Earth, ninety-six percent are livestock and humans—only four percent are wild mammals.
Tears flow. I long for a world more alive than the one we inhabit. For rivers to run clear and flocks of birds to fill the sky. Ancient trees to cover the land. Oceans to teem with whales and coral. For machines that mine coal, oil, and trees to be dismantled. For people to stop extracting and start honoring. For lost cultures and species to return, and be driven out no more.
Longing is prayer, and prayer is a conversation. If we listen to nature and our dreams, we can be guided towards the actions that matter most. If we ask and await the mystery, we can receive a response and then embody what is asked. Prayer is what we become when we offer our lives in creative service.
Will civilization collapse first, before the biosphere?
Or after all species and wild places are already gone? Species can’t survive without unspoiled habitat, but there is less every day. Even in the wake of late-stage global capitalism, I long for a sustainable society, rooted in an ethical approach in its relationship with the land, honoring the voices of river, bird, rock, and tree.
These collaborative relationships have existed for millennium. The Yao people still team up with the honeyguide bird in sub-Saharan Africa to hunt for honey. Using a series of special chirps, humans and birds communicate with each other. The honeyguide birds lead the way to hidden beehives, and the Yao people share the sweetness with their avian friends.
Protecting
Is the Kauai ‘O’o aware this is his last message to the world? What will humanity’s last song be? The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. She had a palsy that made her tremble and never laid a fertile egg in her life. In the 19th century, passenger pigeon migrations darkened the sky. Flocks took hours to pass and were so loud that human conversation was impossible. These birds sustained people through the winter. By the mid-1890’s, flock sizes numbered in the dozens rather than hundreds of billions.
Passenger pigeons were hunted out of existence. After the invention of the telegraph and the railroad, the commercial pigeon industry boomed. Hunters killed them in their nesting grounds and harvested the squabs. No one stopped when their numbers crashed. People slaughtered them until the end. In the 19th century, people did not believe they could drive a species to extinction. This seems to mirror a denial still present today. Most people do not believe humans are destroying the biosphere of the living planet.
“People need these jobs,” the passenger pigeon industry said to avoid restrictions on hunting. Industries today make similar claims, as their mines, dams, and industrial agriculture clear cut and pave over ecosystems, poison rivers and the sea, and dry up underground aquifers.
Indigenous peoples have always been the Earth’s greatest defenders.
Indigenous people protect eighty percent of global diversity, even though they comprise less than five percent of the world’s population. The Earth needs more people to stand in solidarity. I wonder if the Kauai ‘O’o felt as desperate as I do, if he understood that the planet is being plundered. I imagine myself singing alongside him, calling out—are you out there? What will you do to protect the beloved Earth?
Industry plans to destroy a critical corridor for pronghorn antelope and mule deer, nesting ground for golden eagles, ferruginous hawks, and prairie falcons. Lithium Americas is slated to build a lithium mine on Thacker Pass. They say it will provide jobs. Falsely, they call it green to manufacture belief that it somehow will not destroy the biosphere. Five to eight percent of the global population of endangered sage-grouse live there.
The watershed is home to the threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout and the endemic King’s River pryg. I invite you to join environmentalists Max Wilbert and Will Falk in protesting the mine. I will be joining them the last two weeks of April.
The songs of eagles, hawks, falcons, and sagebrush are priceless and irreplaceable.
This is the video that inspired Rebecca’s article.
Friends of Earth International (FoEI) published a report revealing the greenwashing of net zero emissions of the fossil fuel industries. In this piece, Kim Hill writes about the problems with the concept of economic growth that the report does not acknowledge.
A recent report from Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) unpacks the greenwashing of fossil fuels in the term ‘net zero emissions’. Net zero is a scheme for expanding the oil and gas industry, that does nothing to address the causes of climate change, and indeed exacerbates ecological collapse.
This is how FoEI describes net zero targets: “‘Greenwashing’ hardly suffices as a term to describe these efforts to obscure continued growth in fossil emissions — ‘ecocide’ and ‘genocide’ more accurately capture the impacts the world will face.”
FoEI joins the many environmental activists and groups campaigning against net-zero, in defence of the ecosystems, indigenous peoples, peasants and third-world communities that are being harmed by fossil fuel expansion and offset trading.
The climate movement has adopted net zero emissions as its core demand, and continues to mobilise many thousands of people around the world to join protests in support of this goal. By endorsing the fossil fuel companies’ campaigns for net-zero pledges and targets, rather than taking the side of environmental groups organising against it, the climate movement and Extinction Rebellion are complicit in genocide and ecocide. While individual climate activists may have other motives, the movement as a whole is controlled by corporate interests, and has been co-opted into marketing the goals of its funders.
While climate activists have been inspired by the celebrity status of Greta Thunberg in coalescing around the net zero target, Greta herself has said in recent months “we must forget about net zero” and calls these schemes “empty words, loopholes and greenwash.”
Just a few of the many headlines to be found via a web search of the term net zero emissions.
Two recent articles in The Guardian also expose the net zero spin. One titled Global oil companies have committed to net zero emissions. It’s a sham. says “many companies and countries are using “net zero” to justify expanding the production of fossil fuels…All that the major oil companies have done (with tacit support from many governments) is shift their public narrative about the climate crisis from denial to delusion. They’re no longer insisting there’s no problem, because they lost that argument. “net zero” is their attempt to continue business as usual without addressing what they’re doing to people and the planet.”
A second article, The climate crisis can’t be solved by carbon accounting tricks, states “Net zero increasingly involves highly questionable carbon accounting. As a result, the new politics swirling around net zero targets is rapidly becoming a confusing and dangerous mix of pragmatism, self-delusion and weapons-grade greenwash.”
The FoEI report, titled Chasing Carbon Unicorns, opens with: “Powerful actors, particularly those most responsible for emissions, such as the fossil fuel industry and agribusiness, continue to obscure the need for the phase-out of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions with the distractions and seductions of the carbon market. “net zero” pledges are a new addition to the strategy basket of these actors who are fighting hard to maintain the status quo. And the status quo will certainly worsen the climate catastrophe.”
A few more excerpts:
“These deliberate corporate strategies distract attention from the undeniable and urgent need to eliminate fossil fuel emissions…”
“‘Net zero’ is a smokescreen, a conveniently invented concept that is both dangerous and problematic…” (p4)
“engineered “negative emissions” technologies, such as bioenergy carbon capture and storage(BECCS) or direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), are untested.” (p8)
“There are no saviour ecosystems around the planet, nor fairy godmother technologies, that will suck up continued fossil fuel emissions.” (p8)
“at best there are no overall emission reductions from an offset” (p11, emphasis in original)
“financial interests are not giving up on the profit-making opportunities they see in markets for carbon and for financial assets, such as securities and derivatives, based on carbon.” (p13)
“There are no surprises among the members of the TSCVM [Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets]. BP, Shell, and Total represent the oil majors; Bunge, Nestlé, and Unilever are there for agribusiness; Boeing, easyJet, and Etihad, the aviation sector. Bank and finance industry members include Bank of America, BlackRock, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, Itaú Unibanco, and Standard Chartered…Major big green conservation organisations are also engaged in the effort to rehabilitate offsetting and help to dramatically increase the supply of “nature-based” offset credits. Four organisations sit on the consultative group of the TSVCM: Conservation International (CI), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). All four are prominent advocates for “nature-based” solutions / offsets. All four have active projects in the developing world that are set to generate carbon-offset credits, sometimes including direct alliances with fossil fuel majors.” (p15)
“Government “net zero” targets also obscure fossil emissions and the responsibility for reducing those emissions, as do the “net zero” pledges of the private sector.” (p16)
The report ends with no realistic plan of action, but instead lists vague demands comprising meaningless buzzwords, and calls for “real zero”, a target cooked up in an equally murky shade of greenwash. At no point does FoE acknowledge the reality that infinite economic growth will rapidly destroy all life on Earth, regardless of how the economic system is powered. It takes no account of the physical impossibility of powering a globalised growth economy without continued extraction of fossil fuels, nor the enormous expansion of mining and land-grabbing required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels at scale. The necessity of scaling back and localising economic activity, and prioritising the needs of people and nature over corporate profits, is never mentioned. Despite sincere efforts to expose the distractions marketed by corporate actors, FoE reveals its own reliance on corporate funding as a serious limit on what it can achieve.
A movement that can genuinely bring down the fossil fuel industry and stop the destruction of nature needs to extract itself from corporate funding, and be completely independent of business interests. It needs to abandon the tactic of making nebulous demands that can be twisted around by governments and corporations to promote ecocidal economic growth. Merely marching in the streets, and expecting governments and corporations to represent the interests of the people, is a failed tactic. Activists will need to be strategic, and take personal responsibility for organising the direct dismantling of fossil fuel infrastructure. The movement must take an eco-centric rather than business-centric view, and unite around the goal of permanently shutting down all extractive and destructive industries, and regenerating damaged landscapes and communities.
Bright green is a phrase that means that they believe that this culture can be made to be sustainable with some technological fixes. One of the ways we see this would be they believe that wind and solar will save the planet from global warming. Wind and solar can run the economy and not harm the planet. The lies are, well, that.
The fundamental lie is that we can have this level of consumption and a planet too. That you can eat the planet and still have a livable planet. More specifically the lies would be that wind and solar and geothermal, etc. don’t harm the planet. That they can run an industrial economy, neither of which is true. Even in their own terms, they’re not being accurate.
The fundamental problem with all of this is they’re solving for the wrong variable. What do all the so called solutions to global warming, that you here in the mainstream media, have in common? What they have in common is that they take industrial civilization is being given. The natural world as having to adapt to industrial capitalism, to conform to industrial capitalism.
I remember a line in some paper or another where they said that the rule of nature is adapt or die. They were talking about some species being driven extinct by this culture. That’s saying that everybody has to adapt to this way of living or die.
That’s literally insane in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. Because the landbase has to be primary. The health of the planet has to be primary. Without the planet, you cannot have a social system whatsoever. Every social system that has ever existed is based on the health of the land. And if you have a way of life that is based on destroying the health of the land, that is, not a planet with a future.
The fundamental lie is that we can continue this way of living with just a change in what fuels the destructive activities. I don’t think it really matters. It doesn’t matter to the fish being caught in the drift net, whether the ships are fueled by bunker fuel or solar, apart from the fact that solar wouldn’t do it anyways.
The book tackles the greenwashing surrounding so much so-called “green” technology and other false solutions. The authors read excerpts from the book, discuss it’s themes, and answer audience questions.
You can order the book into your local bookstore (or for delivery) here.
Music: Trick or Treat (instrumental) by RYYZN Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
Hundreds of Jenu Kuruba people have launched an indefinite protest in the Nagarhole National Park, India, to demand that the authorities stop trying to evict them, and recognize their rights to the forest.
According to India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA), the tribe has rights to live in, “protect” and “conserve” their lands.
The Jenu Kuruba’s rights to their lands should have been recognized many years ago – they first submitted their claims in 2009. But like many tribes across the country, their claims have been ignored.
JK Thimma, a Jenu Kuruba leader from Nagarhole, said today: “We Adivasi [tribal] people know how to take care of the forest and animals and we can do this much better than them. This is what we should fight for. We want the Forest Department to leave and hand over the forest to us, we will take care of the forest.”
The evictions and harassment that the Jenu Kuruba have endured are part of a racist and colonial conservation model that takes indigenous peoples’ land and turns it into protected areas for tourism, accompanied by gross human rights abuses.
The protest comes at a time when dissent is being brutally crushed in Modi’s authoritarian India. The police response to farmers’ protests in Delhi sparked international outrage and many Adivasi activists, such as Hidme Markam, have been arrested and imprisoned for speaking out.
For many years, WCS India has led the call for the relocation of tribal peoples from tiger reserves, insisting these are “voluntary relocations” which benefit the tribes. Yet communities report worse living conditions and a desire to return to their forest, prompting the US government to halt funding for relocations in the name of conservation.
JK Thimma told Survival: “WCS go to the Forest Department and bring officials and come here to tell us to leave.” He added: “We don’t want any money. We want to live free in the forest. The tribes, the forest and the animals are all one thing. If the officials come and shoot us we are ready to die, but not to leave the forest.”
The Jenu Kuruba have lived in and protected the forests of Karnataka for millennia.
They worship the tiger, and their careful management of the forest has ensured a healthy tiger population.
Muthamma, a Jenu Kuruba woman explained: “We’ve lived together with tigers for centuries, we don’t kill them and the tigers don’t kill us. We revere the tiger as a deity; we have a tiger altar over in the forest. The conservationists from the city don’t understand the forest. As long as we’re alive the tigers will still be safe. If we disappear, the loggers and poachers will have free rein.”
Another forest-dwelling tribe, the Soliga, were the first tribe to get their community forest rights recognised in a tiger reserve – which then saw tiger numbers increase far more than the national average.
Survival’s Senior Researcher Sophie Grig said today: “The Jenu Kuruba face constant harassment and threats from forest guards, who stop them from growing their food, building their houses, practicing rituals in their sacred groves or accessing their family graves. All these are flagrant violations of their rights. The Jenu Kuruba are the true conservationists and protectors of Nagarhole’s forests – it’s high time that their rights to live in, protect and conserve their ancestral lands are recognised.”
Patriarchy is one of the pillars of civilization (aka The Culture of Empire). True justice, equality and sustainability can only be achieved by radically dismantling all patriarchal structures and institutions. As a radical feminist organization, DGR has committed to protect women’s rights (including their boundaries) and to challenge patriarchy.
Last week, women across the UK gathered to express collective grief and anger at the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard, whose body has now been formally identified after she was reported missing three weeks ago. From the large gathering that was forcibly broken up by police in Clapham — the place Sarah was last seen — to smaller tributes and vigils such as the one I attended in Oxford, to individuals lighting candles in their own homes, it seems Sarah Everard’s abduction from the streets of the capital has deeply shaken thousands of women.
Often when women are murdered by men, we can feel anger on behalf of the victim without feeling ourselves to be particularly at risk. We tell ourselves that since we aren’t in abusive relationships, or we aren’t involved in prostitution, we’re safe. As far as the public is aware though, neither of these circumstances applied to Sarah Everard. It wasn’t especially late when she walked home, she wasn’t drunk after a night out, nor was she wearing so-called “provocative” clothing. The neighbourhood she was walking in is a byword for yuppie gentrification and certainly not one that many would consider dangerous. CCTV shows her walking along a main road while talking to her partner on the phone. And yet, she disappeared. Many women find this frightening and disturbing because they wouldn’t think twice about doing exactly what Sarah did.
Other elements of this case also make it particularly disturbing. The fact that the man charged with her murder is a police officer. The fact that police are now carrying out an investigation into whether more minor accusations against the same man weeks prior were dealt with appropriately: the implication being that, perhaps if they had been taken more seriously, Sarah might still be alive; and also that if a man flashes you, he might be a murderer (and the police might not care). Then there is the fact that, before the suspect was arrested, police reportedly warned women to be careful going out alone, which has of course fuelled the usual controversies over women curtailing their behaviour due to the threat of violence from men. And finally, there’s the grim drip-dripping inevitability of it: woman missing; family concerned; searching ponds, but not assuming anything yet — man arrested but not charged; man charged with murder; “human remains;” “dental records” — yes, it’s her. It’s given this unfolding story a sickening “can’t look away, even though we all know how it ends” quality which is all too tragically familiar.
With this kind of nightmare story, it’s virtually always human female remains, and virtually always a man arrested. It seems trite to point out, because we all know it’s true. And yet, despite the obviousness of this statement, each case is seen as an isolated tragedy rather than part of a wider pattern worth remarking on. As one Twitter user commented, “If female on male violence were a thing like this, we’d be in ankle tags at the very best.”
This is not the first time women have been warned to stay at home for their own safety. During the late 1970s when Peter Sutcliffe — the “Yorkshire Ripper” — was attacking and killing women across Northern England, terrified women were told by police: “Do not go out at night unless absolutely necessary and only if accompanied by a man you know,” provoking an upswelling of anger from feminists who demanded a curfew on men, not themselves. (Julie Bindel claims this was what radicalized her as a teenager).
Forty years later, little has changed.
Less than a month before the women of Clapham were told the same thing, police in Basildon, Essex warned women not to go out alone after a spate of sexual assaults in broad daylight. In 2020, women were told to stay home in Belfast, after a spree of violence in which a man attacked five female members of the public with a knife; in Lincoln, after a teenager was sexually assaulted; and in Anglesey, following a string of indecent exposures and assaults on women. Of these, only the Belfast incident made national rather than local news, and it was a very minor story that was not reported by most newspapers and was soon forgotten.
Can you imagine how big of a news story it would be — and rightly so — if a UK police branch announced that members of an ethnic or religious minority should stay home or else risk being targeted for sexual assault, abduction, or murder? It would be regarded as an appalling failure of policing, effectively saying: people want to hurt you, and we can’t protect you — you’re on your own. This happens again and again to women in towns and cities all over the UK, and it’s business as usual. It’s almost as though male violence against women is like weather: you have to plan around it, but it’s not personal, it just is.
If someone is harassed, physically attacked, or killed because of their race or sexuality, that is a “hate crime” in UK law. Perpetrators of these crimes can often receive a heavier sentence, and specialized governmental and policing groups work to monitor and reduce hate crime. However, there’s no such thing in UK law as a hate crime motivated by sex. This is despite the vast majority of sexual offences — from street harassment to abduction, rape, and murder — happening almost by definition because the victim is a woman or girl (Donald Trump wasn’t interested in grabbing men by the penis), and despite the fact that often the offender is explicitly motivated by hatred or disdain for women. In other words, as stated in the Metropolitan Police’s definition of hate crime, “It is who the victim is … that motivates the offender.”
Arguably, this omission is because the sheer volume of hate crimes directed at women would overwhelm the system. Arguably, it is because misogyny is so deeply naturalized, with the division between the sexes running through every family back to the dawn of our species, that it is just very hard to see that women are systematically the victims of crimes because of their sex.*
You might be excused for assuming this blind spot for sexism is an outdated status quo that will soon be consigned to history. Unbelievably, however, the idea that women aren’t meaningfully discriminated against for being women is being actively maintained in progressive politics today.
Just last week, the SNP’s controversial Hate Crime Bill was passed, after an amendment to include sex as a protected characteristic was rejected. However, the bill does take care to explicitly include “cross-dressers.” When one compares the vast global scale of violence against women to the number of crimes directed specifically at cross-dressers, the deliberate omission of sex is inexplicable. The same week, the Green Party of England and Wales voted against a motion that would have seen sex recognized by the party alongside the other protected characteristics of the Equality Act. In February, expert women-focused domestic violence services in Brighton and in North Lanarkshire both lost their funding in favour of “non-gendered” services that will devote more attention to heterosexual and gay male victims, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of victims are women. Nowadays, sexism isn’t just invisible — it’s taboo, or just embarrassingly passé.
The last week on social media has seen an outpouring of women talking about the ubiquity of sexual harassment, and the precautions they feel they have to take because of male violence. Progressive men have largely made the right noises about needing to listen and do better. However, in an environment where sexism is demonstrably not taken seriously in politics and where women are routinely shunned and demonized for raising concerns about male violence, this all feels rather hollow to me.
Many of those taking to Twitter to tell us to #BelieveWomen and #YesAllWomen very quickly forget these principles the moment it counts. If you don’t believe me, try telling your progressive circle of friends that male sex offenders should not be housed in women’s prisons. You could add that women have alledgedly been raped as a result of this policy, as any fool could have predicted. Rather than justified feminist outrage, you will likely be met with embarrassed silence at best, or some hemming and hawing about how it’s a “difficult issue;” or, at worst, ostracism and accusations of bigotry. Middle class women are allowed to be afraid to go jogging after dark, but there is no sympathy for incarcerated women — some of the most vulnerable members of society, large numbers of whom have prior trauma at the hands of males — who are now locked up with convicted rapists. Any concern raised is just hateful scaremongering masking a conservative agenda.
If you shared one of the cartoons on Instagram debunking #NotAllMen (it’s not personal, it’s a sensible precaution to be wary of all men given the bad actions of some) then what do you say to women who feel intimidated by the presence of males who identify as female in domestic violence refuges? They should just swallow their discomfort, because… Not Those Men? It’s easy to pay lip service in the form of, “Women: if a man is making you feel uncomfortable, don’t spare his feelings — your safety is more important.” It’s much harder to speak up for female boundaries when it actually does hurt male feelings.
With that in mind, do you support the signs cropping up on university campuses, which explicitly tell women that in certain situations they should ignore their discomfort because it’s impolite not to, and shame them for feeling discomfort in the first place? If someone complained about these signs, would you think she was justified, or would you roll your eyes and call her a “Karen” who is making a fuss over nothing? Would you tell women, just like the police have so many times, that if they aren’t comfortable using “all gender” bathrooms — which data shows are less safe for women — they should just stay home? In summer 2020, when JK Rowling explained that she shared many of these concerns as a result of her experience with male violence, did you nod along when people accused her of paranoia and of “weaponizing” her abuse? Do you think she deserved what she got for speaking up?
Those who only support women’s boundaries when it’s a boundary against members of the out-group, not the in-group, do not really support women’s right to draw boundaries at all. If you only stand with women when it’s socially or politically easy to do so, then you aren’t a feminist, you’re a hypocrite. Until we firmly establish that women always have the right to express their concerns and have them taken seriously, we have no hope of defeating the attitudes that allow male violence against women to thrive.
Ellen Pasternack is a PhD student in evolutionary biology living in Oxford, UK.
*It should be noted that not all feminists are in favour of expanding hate crime legislation to include women. However, I highly doubt feminist objections were the reason for the omission of women when the law was drawn up.
