by DGR News Service | Mar 28, 2021 | Alienation & Mental Health, Gender, Male Supremacy, Male Violence, Repression at Home, Women & Radical Feminism
On this urgent episode of the Green Flame, Lierre Keith comments on a new development in the war on women. That development is Biden’s executive order on gender identity, an order signed the day of his inauguration which will eviscerate women’s rights. Lierre Keith is the founder of the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). She is a WoLF board member, a radical feminist for over 40 years and author of six books including the novel Skyler Gabriel, Conditions of War and The Vegetarian Myth: Food Justice and Sustainability.
You can view the video of the interview here.
Jennifer Murnan – Thank you so much Lierre for joining us for this urgent Green Flame. We will be getting this episode out as soon as possible. It is the 22nd and yesterday Biden
Lierre Keith – Two days ago.
JM – Two days ago now, okay…
LK – Two days since the inauguration.
JM – Oh, my god.
LK – He wasn’t even president five hours. Yeah, he did it immediately.
JM – So five hours into his presidency, he issued an executive order that begins to initiate some of the equality and completely circumvents the legislative kind of procedure around those kind of laws. Please explain this to us, what does an executive order do and what did this one do.
LK – Okay. So executive orders are legal. They have been ruled legal by the Supreme Court a long time ago, 100 years ago, a long time. This is a feature of the powers that the president has, that the executive branch holds and they can be very controversial. The way that the government is set up in the United States we’re supposed to have three branches of government. We have the executive, the legislative and we have the Supreme Court, the judicial branch, and they’re supposed to work, by providing checks and balances. We all learn this in first grade, right? The legislature is supposed to make the law, it’s literally what legislature means, that’s their job and the president isn’t really supposed to make the law, that’s not what he does or she does. So, you know of course they find workarounds, that’s what power does, so many, many presidents have done made executive orders. I mean, they have pretty much have all done it for 100 years like very famously Truman, president Truman, desegregated the US military using an executive order. So that’s, I mean, as far as the military goes, that’s for good. He just declared that there was not going to be segregation anymore in the armed forces. And a year or two later it was done. I mean, it’s just with the military they know how to follow orders and they did it. So that was the first major U.S. institution that was desegregated and it went very smoothly and before you know it, black people were ordering white people around and nobody thought anything of it because it was the military. So, there are reasons sometimes that they do this, but you know the downside is that it does circumvent the democratic process. We have a way to pass laws in this country and this is not it so, especially when you’re taking on something that is bound to be controversial, that’s going to change a whole bunch of stuff for a whole bunch of people you want that to happen in the light of day.
Every president does this and then the other side always says, well, this it is executive overreach, it’s this, it’s that. There are always contentious things that happen so I’m not blaming any particular president because, like I said, they all do it. This isn’t like a new evil thing that Biden came up with, but obviously this is one that women are going, we’re going to be hurting from this one. So the promise was that they were going to pass this piece of legislation that was called the Equality Act and that at least would have gone through the proper channels. It would have been in Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, there would have been debate. We all would all have had time to present our view on it; the way that laws are supposed to be passed and they didn’t do that so we’ve got this instead.
All right, so what does the executive order actually say? Well, it’s fairly short, you can read it. It’s online it’s been posted up, you can go to the White House website and look at it. It starts with a decision that happened last year from the Supreme Court that was called the Bostock Decision. Now, the Bostock Decision was three separate cases that were collapsed into one and part of it ruled that gay and lesbian Americans could not be discriminated against due to sexual orientation. That’s fine, nobody has a problem with that, the problem was this another case, the Amy Stephens case. This was a man who decided he was a woman one day and this could have gone two ways. You could have a man who says I would prefer to wear the women’s professional clothes to work instead of the men’s clothes, I’m a man but I want to wear these clothes. That would be a very different argument but that was not what Amy Stevens argued, he argued that he was a woman and therefore he should be wearing the women’s uniform. He worked at a funeral home, the funeral home really didn’t like this, I mean, you’ve got people coming who are in the worst grief of their lives and this was just not something that they wanted anybody to have to deal with. From a feminist perspective it’s just very simple: men cannot be women. Clothing in the United States, for employment purposes, employers are legally allowed to have separate dress codes for men and women. That is, I think, a problem but he’s not addressing that problem. He’s not saying “Well, we shouldn’t have separate dress codes”. I think that women could certainly make that argument, but the courts have ruled that is legal as long as it doesn’t put an undue burden on anybody, as long as they cost basically the same and whatever, don’t do this or that, you’re allowed to have those, still, in the United States it’s not illegal to have a separate dress code. Instead of trying to address that, to say actually anybody should be able to wear professional clothes in a professional environment, he instead argued “No, I’m a woman.” The real kicker here is that he demanded access to the women’s bathroom. His employer said no, so that was what the case was about. The Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, [which is really all we have in the United States to protect a whole bunch of our civil rights], they ruled that it should include gender identity. This is a disaster for women.
In 1964 this didn’t exist as a concept. Gender identity was certainly not included under the category of sex. The people who wrote that legislation certainly didn’t intend that in any way, there’s no evidence that they did. It has protected women. Women have used the Civil Rights Act more than any other group in the United States and there’s a lot of interesting history there, but we don’t really have time to get into it, but anyway The Civil Rights Act is pretty much what we’ve got. In The Bill of Rights that we have there’s a series of what are called negative freedoms. The Bill of Rights restricts the reach of the Federal Government. So we don’t actually have a proactive right to speech under the First Amendment. What we have is a right not to be interfered with . So “the government shall make no laws…” That’s what the first ten amendments really are about. It’s trying to keep the government out of what are people’s sort of natural human rights. If you look back in history what you had at the founding of this country is you’ve got the rising mercantile class and what they’re fighting is essentially an older system which involved a king, hereditary power. The rising mercantile class was fighting them and saying “No, we have rights and we don’t want you to rule over us, we’re going to rule over ourselves.”
So what you had was a bunch of very rich, essentially white men, saying, “I won’t interfere with you, you don’t interfere with me and we’re going to call that freedom.” Now, as far as that goes it’s certainly been helpful, I’m glad we have a First Amendment but that’s as far as it ever went.
Regardless, here we are today, so what Biden has done, taking this Bostock Decision instead of sex, we’re going to have gender identity. So every place in the law that was protecting women as a group, as a class based on our biology, will now they’re going to instead say “gender identity.” They can’t define gender identity. It’s not in this executive order. There’s literally no definition. A few states that have tried to have definitions; I mean, in New Jersey “a gender identity is a gender-related identity” and I’m not making that up. It’s completely circular and this is because it’s complete nonsense. I know we all keep using the Emperor’s New Clothes as our big metaphor but I don’t have a better one. It’s just complete nonsense, it means nothing. Yeah, “a circle is a thing we call a circle,” great! Does not tell you what a circle is! The most ridiculous thing is that we all know what a man is and what a woman is. This isn’t actually up for debate. We have sexually dimorphic species for 500 million years on this planet. There’s just men and there’s women. This is actually not very complicated. They have made it complicated, but it is not complicated. We all know who can bear the babies and who doesn’t. For the whole history of Patriarchy, they’ve never had a problem figuring out who the women were: who was going to be sold as a child bride, was going to have her genitals mutilated, who was gonna have her feet bound, who wasn’t allowed to vote. I mean, in 1976 when my mother divorced my father she couldn’t get a credit card in her name, she couldn’t get a bank account. That didn’t happen to my father! We all know who that happened to and why we have a feminist movement.
So Bostock has now come to fruition. We saw this in the ruling. Anybody can read it all, this information is public. That’s what they said, that “transgender status” defined a discreet group of people. Again, they never defined it because it’s not definable, it’s simply an internal feeling and it has nothing to do with physical reality. So this executive order, all the federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination, now they’re going to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity”. This involves all the Federal Civil Rights offices across the country which are now going to have to enforce this. This is where you used to go if you felt like there was workplace discrimination or something that was one of the legal remedies that you had. Women aren’t going to have that remedy anymore. Men will.
JM – That was definitely my question, what does this do to United States women immediately?
LK – Women are now going to be the people who are the problem, right? Men are going to come and say, “Women aren’t letting me do X, Y and Z.” “I’m not allowed in the women’s bathroom, I’m not allowed to take a woman’s job that’s been reserved for women”– and that’s discrimination. So women are going to have to give way. We are now the problem that has to be solved rather than the people who are being hurt, systematically hurt. It’s completely the opposite now–, we are the boundary that has to be broken. So, this is every federal agency. They’ve been directed to do comprehensive assessment of all their regulations and they have one hundred days to plan how they are going to now insert gender identity in the place of sex. How they’re going to interpret all this through the lens of gender identity? So this includes all American employers, it includes all the institutions and indeed eventually all the individuals. So you think about all the federal agencies, well that immediately includes housing and urban development (HUD) and they are the people who run all the, you know, (all the notreligious homeless shelters but) all the public homeless shelters. So now you’ve got an incredibly vulnerable group of women who are not going to be able to keep men out. There have already been cases where women have been sexually assaulted in homeless shelters.
There’s a case that’s still ongoing from Sacramento, California, where [thank God, women were able to find a lawyer but they have terrible experiences of how] a man was forced into the homeless shelter with them and they had to shower and share rooms with him and how terrifying this was and the things he did to them.
JM – Of course prisons, any federal prison.
LK – Yes, all the prisons now, and again there are already cases rolling. There’s Illinois, in there’s Texas, there’s Washington. I just want everybody to feel the horror of this; you are a woman locked in a 10 by 10 cell and now we have a man who’s very likely a violent offender, could be a sexual offender, is now put in your cell with you. You have literally no way to escape and this is what they’re going to do to women around the country. They’re already doing it, we just haven’t been able to get any press about it.
In UK, they had mister Karen White who insisted he was a woman and was put in a woman’s prison. He sexually assaulted women and it was all over the news and it really helped them in their fight it broke through into the mainstream. We have not been able to do that here and we have just as many horrifying cases here and nobody wants to hear it., The press is just the a great wall of silence at this point. What’s happening to the most vulnerable women? We know why women end up in prison. We know that they have been abused as children, battered as adults, that they’re in for economic crimes because they’re living in poverty, a lot of them are survivors of prostitution. They’re the women who have been hurt the most by this system and now they’re going to be locked in cells with men, with male predators. The left is who’s pushing this. The Democrats are supposed to be, you know, the side that’s anti-racist and the side that’s for progress, that’s for unity. That’s who’s bringing this. It wasn’t the Republicans who did this to women.
JM – What does this do to children in school systems?
LK – In school? So that’s the next thing.
JM – The federal level of control in this executive order is one of the most horrifying aspects to me about replacing gender identity with sex.
LK – The entire public school system, so anybody who gets federal money is going to have to absolutely give into this. Every school girl will not have a bathroom that she can use in school safely… * dog barks * Hang on one second, this is my dog.
JM – Hi, sweetie!
LK – Yeah, I don’t know why she thinks we’re in danger, we’re not in any danger.
JM – Actually, I think that it’s in our voices, we are in danger, we, really, really are, she knows she’s got sensible animal instincts, yeah. If you’d like to repeat that because we had the barking in the background.
LK – This is every single public school, that’s where the federal money goes. A private school, if you’re not getting federal money, you might not have to give in to this right away. But all the public schools are going to have to do it. Human rights groups around the world will tell you the number one thing that keeps girls out of school is a lack of safe toileting facilities. This is a huge human rights issue in poorer countries. It’s true when girls are very young but especially when they start to get their periods, when they hit adolescence it’s over. Girls just drop out in droves because they don’t have a safe place to attend to their menstrual needs. And for some reason we’re just gonna decide that girls in the United States don’t need this. The girls in India need it and girls in Sri Lanka need it and girls in Iran need it and girls in the Congo need it, but girls in the United States somehow it’s different. We have a different kind of man or boy here who would never hurt women and girls and women are perfectly fine to just drop their clothes and pee wherever they want. We all know this is not true. We all know that it is exactly the same here. We deal with predators every day as women and girls. We’ve already got stories of the girls who won’t pee all day long at school and are getting bladder infections and nobody cares.
JM – And then also I know that there was some headway, at least I thought, around the issue of women’s and girls’ sports in schools being totally eliminated because of this.
LK – There’s been push back for whatever reason. That’s an issue that has gotten more coverage. It’s gotten just a little bit, we’ve got a little more purchase on that one. I’m not sure why the sports one, I don’t care, you just take an issue and move. Yeah, there are big cases in Connecticut, there’s three girls, high school girls, who are on the track team and of course a boy joined and they just say there’s no point in running. You just can beaten them by a mile. So we all know this about men and women. W, we have different bodies, women have a bigger pelvis, it takes a half a second more every time we walk, just to take a step because we’re kind of making a right-hand turn there, a right angle, and there’s just no way that women are ever gonna run as fast as men. The fastest women in the world are just barely up to mediocre men. I remember when we had this amazing women’s soccer team in the United States that went to the Olympics and they played a game against high school boys and they lost. These are the best women in the world. We have physical differences, the lung size, the oxygenation, the heart size, muscle size, the strength of the joints, justdown the list. We all know that men and women have different bodies.
Infants are born with a template. They can tell the difference between a male and a female face. We all can do this. I don’t know why they have made this so complicated. , Well, I do know why, but I don’t know why everybody’s falling for it. Okay, we’ve got the prisons, the housing, the battered women’s shelters … Can you imagine being a battered woman escaping your batterer and now he can say, “Oh, I’m a woman, take me into the shelter!” You think men aren’t gonna do that? You’ve ever dealt with a stalker, a batterer? Oh, they’re gonna do it., We know what these men are like. They’re gonna do it. That’s gonna happen and now the schools, it’s every girl in the nation is not gonna have a safe place, and we’re gonna lose sports. It’s a grim day. I mean, Trump was a nightmare and I think we’re all glad he’s was gone.Hhe did a lot to hurt this country and to really sort of degrade our democratic processes such as they are, but it just went from one to the other. We knew this was coming, Biden had promised it and he did it.
JM – And the left is a horrible nightmare in the war against women.
LK – Yeah, an absolute nightmare. The way that Eric Weinstein encapsulates it: we have MAGAstan on one side and we have Wokenstan on the other side.
JM – No…
LK – That’s it, right? Those are our choices in the United States. In terms of employment law, a man now can’t be fired for claiming to be a woman, but a woman can be fired for pointing out that he’s a man.
LK – There’s gonna be a lot of compelled speech coming down at us. Right now it’s sort of behind the scenes. There are articles in the law journals in which the lefty, Wokenstan people are horrified that court documents don’t refer to people using their “preferred pronouns.” This has already happened in England. I don’t know if you followed Maria Mclaughlin’s case, but she was assaulted by a man who thinks he’s a woman at a public talk. He punched her in the face and broke her camera. He assaulted her. She was told by the judge that she had to call him ‘her.’She was compelled to use female pronouns for a man who assaulted her. Now, I want you to picture you’ve got a rape victim in court and she’s being told that she has to refer to this man as a woman, “His female penis did this to me…”
JM – And the consequences of not following that compelled speech are fines?
LK – Contempt.
JM – You can be in contempt, of course.
LK – You could be thrown in prison for contempt of court.
JM – You can be thrown in prison.
LK – Absolutely.
JM – For non-compliance.
LK – That would be me, I’m not going to comply to this. But it you’re asking the average woman to have to stand up to this while she’s on trial after the worst trauma of her life, she’s going to have to refer to a man as a woman, I mean, my head is just kind of exploding here. This is where we are. And the outside influence of the United States is always… this is going to go everywhere now. It’s not just us. It’s going to go around the world. So it’s bad and we can’t get any public debate. We can’t get any news analysis., There’s no mainstream coverage of this. This has been the problem for, well, over a decade, where we just cannot get anybody to pay attention to it. We get a little bit of right-wing coverage but that’s it. The mainstream news they won’t touch it and it’s for the same reason, it’s institutional capture., They’ve already been captured. There are journalists terrified of losing their jobs, We hear from them all the time, they know the truth of this, but they can’t say it because they’ve got mortgages to pay, so I don’t know what’s going to break through, what’s it gonna take. Somebody’s gonna haveJM – You would think, of all the places where biological reality would still hold, it would be in health and health care and it’s not.
LK – No, it’s not.
DM – And the consequences of not having that, that’s one of the things where my head just explodes, frankly.
LK – Yeah, and there’s an even bigger problem. The actual doctors and nurses may well be compelled to perform these surgeries and provide these really dangerous drugs. Because what’s already been done legally, the argument is that if you already provide mastectomies for women with cancer or hysterectomies for women who have uterine cancer or other you know polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) or whatever conditions, endometriosis, where you might actually have a medical need to have your uterus removed. If you do those procedures, you can’t make a distinction between somebody with a disease, you know, a medical problem and somebody who actually just wants it electively. You are not allowed to make that distinction. If someone calls themselves trans, you then have to provide the same care even though it’s a completely different situation. There’s nothing wrong with their bodies, their bodies are perfectly healthy. But the law will be they’re forcing doctors and nurses to have to do this these procedures. The law will be forcing insurance companies to have to pay for it. This just seems like the ‘right of conscience’ thing for doctors, I mean, they take an oath to do no harm and some of these patients people are just they’re children. We’re talking about 13-year-old girls having mastectomies here in California and in Oregon, that’s madness! You can’t drink, you can’t drive, you can’t vote, you can’t pierce your ears, but you can have your uterus removed, your breasts chopped off. When you’re a teenager you’re not thinking about whether you’re going to have children.
JM – No.
LK – So many people who never wanted children and then they turned 28 and fell in love. Then they had children, you know, found a partner, had have a baby and it just completely transformed their lives. It’s like the most incredible experience they’ve ever had, would do anything to protect those children. We know that having a baby can bring out the kind of love that brings out in people and it’s utterly life-altering. You can’t make that decision when you’re 12 or 13, you can’t make it when you’re 17. You have no idea what’s coming in your life, you’re a totally different person when you’re 30.
JM – Yes.
LK – And we’re letting these kids just… they’re saturated in self-hatred. The porn industry has completely taken over the culture. I have nothing but sympathy for these poor girls. I know why they hate their bodies. They’ve been given their own story, you know, –in my generation, we did anorexia and cutting, that was how we did our self-hatred and it was for the same reasons. We’d all been molested, we were all looking at a culture that considered our bodies public property: ridiculous, insulting, worthy of contempt; they weren’t ours to inhabit, they belong to men, they didn’t belong to us. We all had these experiences of being harassed or groped or terrified or maybe outright raped. I understand, there’s no question why young girls feel this way as they become teenagers.
You hit 11, 12 years old and it’s just a completely different world walking down the street. It’s terrifying and you realize you’re never going to be safe again. So I get why they’re doing it, but they don’t have “gender dysphoria.” They have life in Patriarchy and the only solution is, honestly, Feminism, It’s a political movement that’s gonna change men’s behavior. But they’re not being told that. What they’re being told is that it’s personal to them. They just happen to have a special human essence that was born in a sadly female body, but we can attend to that: you can take dangerous drugs, you can have these horrible surgeries and try to live under the wire as a kind of a faux man, and that’s the option out. There’s already a whole generation of these girls. A lot of them are lesbians, a lot of them are autistic, they never fit, none of the roles seemed right. Well, it doesn’t for most of us, but especially I think for some women it’s probably a little bit harder. Now they’re 21 years old and they’ve been in medical menopause for four years. They have all the problems that you get when you’re 60 or 70, you know, things like urinary incontinence, a 20 year-old needs to deal with that? The surgeries they do on the young men, I don’t even have words, what they did to Jazz Jennings on television. Millions of people watch this young man have his genitals permanently removed and this was supposed to be some kind of liberatory practice. The hatred of the human animal here just blows my mind. That we don’t protect the young, instead we’re going to do this to them. It’s just beyond me.
JM – That blows my mind as a parent too and I’ve heard multiple parents with their hearts ripped out because they’re watching their children be devoured by this insane culture and what is like the antithesis of being biocentric: complete denial of basic biological reality and being eaten alive and they’re gutted emotionally and mentally by what’s happened to their children, that’s one of the most horrifying aspects of gender identity piece so….
LK – No one will help them. The people who should be helping us are the ones who are doing the damage. You’d think that doctors and therapists and school teachers and all these institutions that are supposed to be progressive and leftward leaning, that are supposed to care about human rights and are supposed to care about women and children and every last one of them has been captured. Now we have this executive order, that it’s just like nailing in more nails on the coffin here for these young people. I am not hopeless, we are not giving up, we are going to fight, but it is very hard. This is a hard week.
JM – WoLF has done spectacular work around fighting legislation or working that line of being able to be politically effective in the face of this and I know that it’s really hard, but I don’t know what to do with an executive order. Do you have any ideas about where we begin to fight back on them?
LK – Executive orders are not free from judicial oversight. They can be declared unconstitutional. The very first legal action that WOLF took was actually to try to sue the Obama Administration over the first time that this happened. That was when Obama did it at the end of his term, he went ahead and did these same executive orders. He made everything be ‘by gender identity’ instead of sex and that was the first lawsuit that we filed.
So, we need a few things. One is a whole bunch of money because none of this comes cheap. Which is sad, but it’s just reality. It can be millions of dollars to run a lawsuit. And then we need a plaintiff, you have to have somebody who would support this. It can’t happen right away. We have to find somebody, somewhere, who can say that this executive order has somehow infringed on her basic rights. Or it could be a man, too, I mean, it’s going to hurt young guys as well. We need somebody to come forward and help and be that person in the lawsuit. That’s a big ask because we know what happens to people who put their heads up above the parapet on this issue., We know it can destroy your life rather permanently at this point, but it has to be done. While we’re waiting to do that, we’ve got a bunch of other stuff sort of coming down the pipeline, but the main thing is that we can try to fight this in the courts. But it’s gonna take time, it’s not gonna happen overnight.
I want people to understand another thing about this as well, which is the reason that Obama did it, which is probably the same reason that Biden did it: in the United States, (people who don’t live here don’t get how bad some of this stuff is) first the Supreme Court, well over 100 years ago, ruled that corporations are people so they have the same rights as an actual human being would have. Then they ruled that included the First Amendment, so they have speech rights like you and I would have. Then, not that long ago they ruled that you can’t actually restrict the amount of money that people donate to political candidates because that’s a form of political speech. It’s a very important speech. You can’t put in any kind of line under it. So the floodgates opened and what was left of our political system was completely captured by the wealthy corporations. In people’s daily lives they don’t understand why things have gotten even worse and worse. In my lifetime, it has certainly happened, and that’s one of the main reasons. The magic trick is done completely above board because it’s not craft graft, it’s not paying bribes behind the scenes. It’s done completely openly and legally. The very wealthy– who aren’t even people, they are corporations– are allowed to simply ‘buy’ candidates. I’m not picking on Obama here, every last candidate you see running has these kind of backers. It’s the only way. They need millions of dollars to get their candidates and their candidacies up and running. To run a candidate for president, I don’t even want to think how much money that costs. The only way to do it is to get these backers. In terms of Obama, he’s from Illinois and one of the big big billionaire families out there is the Pritzkers and they’re a pharmaceutical company. This is all public information, they owned an airline, they own the Hyatt hotels, just on and on the amount of businesses churning money they made. Pharmaceuticals is huge for their wealth, and they’re billionaires and they bought him his first senate seat in Illinois. They put a bet on him and their horse won. Then they bought him his senate seat in Washington. Then he became, in the federal government, he was senator. Then they put more money on him. They got him into the White House. They’re not the only ones, there certainly were other corporate interests behind it. Again, I’m not picking on him., This is how the system works. It’s how the Court said it should work and it’s working fine for them, but this is what we’re up against. So Pritzkers put him in and then it was payback time and they also have a very famous member of their family: Jennifer Pritzker who I think was born, what was his original name? I don’t even remember, James, maybe, it started with a J. Jonathan, yeah, he’s a man who thinks he’s a woman. They’ have got a big trans in their family so that was the payoff. When it was his second term, two years in Obama went ahead and did all these executive orders. It was quite clearly just what they wanted so he gave it to them. That was the payoff.
JM – So, is this a replay?
LK – Yeah, it is because Penny Pritzker was a huge backer of Biden. She actually ran the fundraising for Biden. This is public information, I am not making this up and this is not, I just want to be really clear, this is not a crazy conspiracy. This is literally how the American political system works, okay? This is legally how it’s done above board, they just buy themselves candidates and that’s what they did. We are up against billionaires, the Pritzkers are billionaires and they wanted this legislation, they wanted these executive orders. How many of us are there? A few hundred? Okay, here’s my ten dollars. This is what we’re fighting.
We have truth, we have righteousness, we have our love for women, we have our love for the planet. I don’t want to instill more despair in anybody who’s listening. We are not giving up, I will not surrender and I don’t think any of you will either, but this is definitely David versus Goliath and this didn’t come out of nowhere. These men have been planning this for decades. They had an entire plan, it’s called the Yogyakarta Principles. They all got together in 2006 and made a list of what their demands were going to be. One by one they’ve done it. But they’re the billionaire class, they have all this money, they could do it. A lot of people are like, “Where did this all come from? It dropped out of nowhere.” It feels It may feel that way if you’re kind of ignoring it,but I’ll tell you as someone who’s been fighting this since the 80s: oh, no, it didn’t drop out of nowhere. They got billions of dollars. They had a political plan and they’ve gotten it done. Now here we are and all the women and girls in the United States are going to pay the price. So that’s where we are. We’re not going to lose,
We also have truth on our side. It is simply true that men cannot become women and no matter what kind of post-modern gobbledygook they want to put on, it can’t be done. You are the sex you are. You cannot be born in the wrong body, that’s like a prayer. As far as I’m concerned you have one body. It’s your one chance to be alive. You got to be born. How is that not enough? Just to be alive! And I understand all the things that happen to us that make us hate our physical embodiment, but it’s all we’ve got. It’s still a miracle every morning to breathe, to wake up, take that breath of air, look at the green trees and the yellow, the sun and feel the warmth and know that you’re loved and pet your dogs and hug your children. Every single, sensual moment of that is just a miracle! How did we lose sight of that to the point where we think our bodies are lego blocks so we can buy parts and remove them and slap them back on?, It’s a very poor simulacrum at best.
JM – It sounds like Mary Shelley’s nightmare.
LK – It is! She was on it! She was always saw it coming, she really did. She saw the arrogance of that scientific mind and what that had to do with male domination and the male violation imperative., She got it all, and she was just a teenager when she wrote that book., She saw it coming.
JM – It comes to you in dreams and it comes to you out of your heart. That’s so inspiring, Lierre, in the face of such a nightmare. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with listeners about where to look? Because you’re not going to stop fighting and we want to support you and we want to support all women everywhere in the United States. We’re going to have to grind through this and and defeat this nightmare. So where do we look? What do we look to? Who inspires you that you’d like to leave us with?
LK – A few things right away, We have a petition, if you go to the WoLF website you can sign the petition. More important: write a letter. Write a letter to the Biden administration., Write a letter to Kamala Harris. Write a letter to your legislatures. Call your senators on the phone. Tell them you’re upset about this. Explain to them what’s going on and then reach out to your state legislatures too, because this is going to be a state-by-state battle as well. It’s already a state-by-state battle. You’ve got to get involved and, I know it’s terrifying, I do know that. The people who come at us really mean it, they’re unhinged, they’re violent. They will destroy your life if they decide to. You will lose your job. You can lose your house. There’s not a woman I know who hasn’t had serious losses to this. Some of us have lost our careers entirely. I know people about to leave the country, it’s… I’m not gonna sugarcoat what you may be up against, to come out on this one. But it has to be done. So contact every single, you know, anybody who represents representative you have in any government at all, from the local to the to the federal level, reach out to them, talk to them, get your talking points ready, go with a friend. They have to see you if your you’re a constituent., That is your right. They have to let you come and talk to them. You may only be able to see staffers if they’re big people, but they still they have to take your information, they have to sit and listen to you. So, get yourselves together, practice beforehand, but do it. We have to learn how to engage with the political process. I think a lot of us who are more on the radical edge, we a lot of times spend our lives kind of rolling our eyes on at it because it just seems so reformist. But there are times and places where we have to engage and this is definitely one of them. Otherwise they win. If we don’t show up to do our part, they’re going to win. Because there’s no fight back and they have captured everything at this point. We’ve got to start pushing back. We’ve got to learn to do that. Go with a friend, just, you know, put on your your big girl’s shoes and just get it done. They’re just people, honestly. I’ve done it, I’ve lobbied, they’re just people like me and you and they don’t know more than we do either, especially not on this issue. It doesn’t matter whether you have democrats or republicans representing you, they all need to hear it. They have not heard a feminist analysis, they don’t understand how this is going to hurt women and girls. Everybody thinks it’s kind of gay plus and it’s not. It’s not anything like gay and lesbian rights, nothing like it at all. So we’ve just got to speak up. And then speak to everybody in your life about it. I know that’s hard. People are going to be very mad at you, but it has to be done. Whoever you are, if you’re listening to this you probably have really nice friends, you’ve got good family, they probably have really good hearts. They want what’s best for everyone. They need to understand how this is going to hurt women and girls and that you’re not helping young people who hate their bodies by letting them do permanent damage that they will regret in five years. So, anyway, all of that, you know, get yourselves together, but we’ve got to talk to people, our friends, our family, our neighbors and then everybody in a position of political power. Sign our petition, write a letter, and if you want to join WoLF, join, because we need help. We need volunteers in every single state. This is going to be massive and it’s going to take all of us. But never surrender.
JM – Never surrender.
LK – Never surrender.
JM – Never. Thank you, Lierre, for all of that thank you.
LK – Thank you.
LK – Thank you.
JM – Yeah, you are so welcome and I’m so glad that the Green flame is going to be able to put this out there with such an eloquent voice. We thank you so much for taking some time because I know you are working tirelessly for everybody, women and girls and the real world.
LK – A lot of us are, so join hands. We gotta do it.
JM – We will.
by DGR News Service | Mar 6, 2021 | Male Supremacy, Male Violence, Movement Building & Support, Pornography, Prostitution, Rape Culture, The Problem: Civilization, Women & Radical Feminism
In Part One of a two part article Jocelyn Crawley offers the reader a history and systemic analysis of the harms towards women. Part two will be published the following day.
When I first discovered how widespread acceptance of and/or compliance towards rape, pornography, pedophilia, prostitution, and sex trafficking are, I was enraged. I once viewed a documentary indicating that pimps systematically show little girls videos of women performing fellatio on men to “educate” them on how to provide this “service” to the males they are trafficked to. One thought I had while attempting to process what was transpiring was: this is crazy. In addition to drawing this conclusion, I was filled with unalloyed shock and deep ire. I then reconceptualized the prototypical way I interpreted reality (men and women coexist together in a state of relative peace marked by periodic hiccups, spats, “trouble in paradise,” etc.) and came to understand that patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet with women being reduced to the subordinated class that men systematically subjugate and subject to a wide range of oppressions.
Part of patriarchy’s power is making its perverse rules and regulations for how reality should unfold appear normative and natural while categorizing anyone who challenges these perversions as insane. Insanity is defined as a state of consciousness confluent with mental illness, foolishness, or irrationality. According to patriarchal logic, any individual who attempts to question or quell its nefarious, necrotic systems and regimes is thinking and acting in an illogical manner. To express the same concept with new language to further elucidate this component of material reality under phallocracy: anyone who does not accept patriarchal logic is illogical or insane according to patriarchal logic. For this reason, it is not uncommon for women who challenge men who sexually harass or intimidate them into sex trafficking to be called insane. It is critically important for radical feminists to examine and explore this facet of the patriarchy in order to gain more knowledge about how phallocentrism works and what can and should be done to abrogate and annihilate it.
To fully understand the integral role that accusing women of being insane plays in normative patriarchal society, one should first consider the etymology of the word.
As noted in “Stop Telling Women They’re Crazy” by Amber Madison, the term hysteria entered cultural consciousness “when people didn’t want to pay attention to a woman” . When this happened, the woman was oftentimes taken to a medical facility and was subsequently diagnosed with hysteria. The phrase “hysteria” was an umbrella term meant to reference women who “caused trouble,” experienced irritability or nervousness, or didn’t reflect the level of interest in sexual activity deemed appropriate by men. The word hysteria is derived from the Greek term “hystera,” which means uterus. Thus the etymological history of the word informs us of the attempt to conflate the psychobiological experience of insanity with the material reality of being a biological female.
In recognizing the role that patriarchal societies play in attempting to establish confluence between insanity and the material reality of being a woman, it is important to note that individuals who take the time to carefully scrutinize patriarchy are cognizant of the male attempt to make mental instability a fundamentally female flaw. For example, Elaine Showalter has noted that the primary cultural stereotype of madness construed the condition as a female malady (Showalter, 1985, as cited in MacDonald, 1986). As noted by Julianna Little in her thesis “Frailty, thy name is woman: Depictions of Female Madness,”
“The most significant of cultural constructions that shape our view of madness is gender. Madness has been perceived for centuries metaphorically and symbolically as a feminine illness and continues to be gendered into the twenty-first century” (5).
In the twenty-first century, individuals who have wished to challenge the notion that the thoughts and emotions experienced by women are automatically and inevitably signs of insanity utilize the term “gaslighting” to refer to this insidious mindfuckery.
The history of men accusing women of being insane in response to accusations of sexual abuse is well-documented.
One significant case which should be a part of public consciousness is that of Alice Christiana Abbott. Abbott poisoned her stepfather in 1867 and, upon being questioned, stated that he had had an “improper connection” with her since she was thirteen. After informing others of this, the majority believed that “something was the matter with her head.” However, there was nothing wrong with her head. In fact, I argue that she operated according to a rightness of mind which recognized sexual assault as fundamentally wrong. Abbott’s stepfather threatened to have her put in reform school if she spoke of the abuse, and this was the assertion that prompted her to act. When her case took place in the Suffolk County Grand Jury, Abbott was committed to the Taunton Lunatic Asylum (Carlisle, “What Made Lizzie Borden Kill?”) That the sentence for challenging a man who sexually abuses a woman incorporates classifying her as insane indicates the patriarchy’s ongoing attempt to construe its malevolent, depraved rules and regulations (which include normalizing and in some cases valorizing the sexual abuse of women) as natural and appropriate.
(The historical reality of men accusing women of being insane and utilizing the assertion to severely limit their life choices and thereby sustain patriarchy is not limited to issues of sexual abuse. In fact, men have appropriated the accusation of female insanity against women who committed any acts which challenged their power. This fact becomes plain when one considers the case of Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard. Packard married Theophilus Packard and experienced ideological disparities with him pertaining to religious philosophy. Specifically, Packard began demonstrating interest in the spiritual ideologies of perfectionism and spiritualism (Hartog, 79).
Perfectionism is a thought system advocating the notion that individuals could become sin-free through will power and conversion. Packard also assented to the notion of spiritualism, with this religious movement promoting the idea that the souls or spirits of dead individuals continued to exist and were also capable of communicating with living people. Theophilus Packard maintained conservative religious views that stood in diametric opposition to the aforementioned ideologies, with his own perspective including the notion of innate human depravity. After Elizabeth Packard began openly questioning his ideas and exploring her own, their ideological dissonance led to his accusation that she was insane. The accusation was officially made in 1860 and Packard decided to have his wife committed. Elizabeth Packard learned of his decision on June 18, 1860. It’s important to note that the patriarchal nature of this scenario is not limited to the interactions and ideological disparities existing between Elizabeth Packard and Theophilus Packard as two individuals. In fact, state law revealed its own patriarchal proclivity for privileging male interpretations of reality for the purpose of disempowering and dehumanizing women. This is the case as when, in 1851, the state of Illinois opened its first hospital for those who were allegedly mentally ill, the legislature passed a law which enabled husbands to have their wives committed without their consent or a public hearing.)
To be continued . . .
Jocelyn Crawley is a radical feminist who resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Her intense antagonism towards all forms of social injustice-including white supremacy-grows with each passing day. Her primary goal for 2020 is to connect with other radicals for the purpose of building community and organizing against oppression.
Works Cited
Carlisle, Marcia R. “What Made Lizzie Borden Kill?” https://www.americanheritage.com/what-made-lizzie-borden-kill#2. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
Hendrik Hartog, Mrs. Packard on Dependency, 1 Yale J.L. & Human. (1989). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol1/iss1/6.
Human Rights Watch. Booted: Lack of Recourse for Wrongfully Discharged US Military Rape Survivors.https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/05/19/booted/lack-recourse-wrongfully-discharged-us-military-rape-survivors#. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021
Macdonald, Michael. “Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England.” Social Research, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986, pp. 261–281. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40970416. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
Madison, Amber. “Stop Telling Women They’re Crazy.” https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2014/09/75146/stop-women-crazy-emotions-gender. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
Marcotte, Amanda. ““Price of calling women crazy: Military women who speak out about sexual assault are being branded with “personality disorder” and let go.” https://www.salon.com/2016/05/20/price_of_calling_women_crazy_military_women_who_speak_out_about_sexual_assault_are_being_branded_with_personality_disorder_and_let_go/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985). quoted in Macdonald, Michael. “Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England.” Social Research, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986, pp. 261–281. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40970416. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
Wright, Jennifer. “Women Aren’t Crazy.” https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a14504503/women-arent-crazy/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2021.
by DGR News Service | Dec 28, 2020 | Repression at Home
In the concluding part of this three part series we are offered a stark reminder of the scale of greed and corruption involved in the drugs trade, a clear analysis of the impact on poverty and a reading recommendations!
By Russell “Maroon” Shoatz/4StruggleMag
Peep the Game
South Amerikan cocaine replaced French Connection and CIA controlled Southeast Asian/Golden Triangle-grown heroin as the drug of choice in the early 1980’s. Remember Miami Vice? Well, as might be expected, this country’s government, intelligence agencies and large banks immediately began a struggle to control this new trade. Remember: control-not get rid of-in complete contrast to their lying propaganda projects like the War on Drugs! Thus, they were in fact dealing with-not fighting-the South Amerikan governments, militaries and large landowners who controlled the raising, processing and shipping of the cocaine. (For a few years, however, the latter themselves had to battle a few independent drug lords, most notably Pablo Escobar Ochoa and his Medellin Cartel).
In this country at that time the youth gangs had next to nothing to do with the cocaine trade, which was then primarily servicing a middle and upper class-and white-clientele. The traffic employed a few old-school big time hustlers along with some Spanish-speaking wholesalers, who also had their own crews to handle matters. Although after the fact, the Hip hop cult movie favorites Scarface and New Jack City are good descriptions of that period, albeit they both-purposely-left out the dominant role that the U.S. government and intelligence agencies played in controlling things. All right, I know you’re down with all of that-and love it!
So let’s move on.
In the middle 1980’s the U.S. began backing a secret war designed to overthrow the revolutionary Sandinista government that had fought a long and bloody civil war to rid Nicaragua of its U.S.-sponsored dictator (Somoza) in 1979. But after being exposed to the world, the U.S. Congress forbade then-president Reagan from continuing this secret war. Like a lot of U.S. presidents, however, he just ignored Congress and had the CIA raise the money, recruit the mercenaries and buy or steal the military equipment to continue the war. Consequently, that’s how and why crack and the mayhem it’s caused came upon us. Here, however, you won’t see Hollywood and TV giving up the raw. With few exceptions like Black director Bill Dukes’ ‘Deep Cover’, starring Laurence Fishburn, and ‘Above the Law’ with Steven Segal, you have to search hard to see it portrayed so clearly. Later I’ll explain why.
Anyway, most people have heard that crack was dumped into South Central Los Angeles in the mid-’80’s-along with an arsenal of military-style assault rifles that would make a First Wave BPP member ashamed of how poorly equipped s/he was. Needless to say, the huge profits from the crack sales, coupled with everyone being financially strapped, magnified the body count! And, since crack was also so easy to manufacture locally and so dirt cheap, just about anybody in the hood could get into the business. Gone were the old days of a few big-time hustlers, except on the wholesale level.
But, make no mistake about it, the wholesale cocaine sold for the production of crack was fully controlled and distributed by selected CIA-controlled operatives.
So, to all of you dawgs who have been bragging about how big you are/were, a top-to-bottom organization chart would in fact look something like this:
- At the top would be the president: Ronald Reagan;
- then former CIA director George Bush, Sr.;
- the National Security Advisor;
- Secretary of State;
- major banking executives;
- Colonel Oliver North;
- General Secord;
- arms dealers;
- mercenary pilots;
- South and Central Amerikan government and military leaders, including Escobar and the Medellin Cartel originally;
- U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, Customs and Border Patrol officers;
- state and local police, and county sheriffs and their deputies, and their successors in office;
- and at the bottom of the barrel: YOU DAWG!
Now I know that you already knew in your hearts that there were some big dawgs over you, but I bet you never imagined the game came straight out of the White House, or that you were straight up pawns on the board. If that sounds too wild, then tell me why it’s harder to find any government, CIA, military or bankers, like George Bush, Sr., and his crew, in prison, than it is to win the lottery? Yeah, they double-crossed Noriega, Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, and made Oliver North do some community service, but that’s all. The real crime lords-the government, military, CIA and banking dons-all got away. Finally, and only after Congresswoman Maxine Waters made a stink about it, was the CIA forced to do two investigations and post on its official website their findings together with an admission of being a drug dealer.
Naw dawg, y’all were played! Face it.
That’s what happened to you O.G.’s from the ’80’s. But as Morpheus said in The Matrix, let me “show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”. Gradually the U.S. government was forced to crack down on the cocaine coming through Florida, but by then the South Amerikan cartels and their government and military allies had found new routes through Mexico. At first the the members of the Mexican underworld were just middlemen; but quickly recognizing a golden opportunity, they essentially seized control of most of the trade between South Amerika and the U.S.They forced the South Amerikans into becoming junior partners who were responsible only for growing and processing, the cheaper the better. The Mexicans now purchased mountains of cocaine for transshipment and smuggling into the U.S. wholesale market, resulting in oil and automotive industry-type profits.
One might wonder why the South Amerikans-powerful players would go for a deal like that. As ever the answers can found in the Machiavellian and serpentine maneuverings of the United States government and its poor Mexican counterpart. You see, in the 1980’s the Mexican government was overseeing an economy that was so bad, that for all practical purposes, it was bankrupt. Indeed, the U.S. and and its underlings in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) were forced periodically to give the Mexican government millions upon millions in loans, in return for unfair trading concessions, in order to prop it up with the economy.
The U.S. was then and is now extremely vulnerable to conditions in Mexico:
because common sense and past experience has told its rulers that the worse things became in Mexico, the more conditions would force its already dirt poor majority to find a way to enter the U.S. to find a means to feed themselves and their families. And the U.S. could not keep prevailing upon the IMF and WB to lend Mexico more money-especially since the U.S. ruling classes saw another way temporarily to plug up the hole in their control of matters in the international financial world. Thus, another unholy alliance was formed. This one was between the U.S. government, CIA, State Department, banks, and the other usual suspects on one side; and their Mexican counterparts-including their first fledgling cartels-on the other, with the South Amerikans now in a junior partnership role.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that it was arranged diplomatically, all neat and tidy. Far from that! No, it evolved through visionaries amongst the usual suspects, putting their ideas before other select insiders and working to craft an unwritten consensus. It was the same way that they along with Cuban exiles in Florida-had used the earlier cocaine trade to fuel the growth around Miami. Only this time it would be Mexico, a much more pressing and unstable situation. It was recognized by all parties that Mexico’s underworld would eventually land in the driver’s seat due to its ability to take the kind of risks called for, its geographical proximity to the U.S. border and, most important, its strong desire to avoid confronting the U.S. and Mexican governments as Pablo Escobar had done.
Mexican Underworld
Thus, the members of the Mexican underworld were more than willing to guarantee that most of their drug profits would be pumped back into the moribund Mexican economy through large building projects, upgrading the tourist industry, big-time farming and other clearly national ventures. And, on the messy side, their gunmen were becoming experts at making reluctant parties fall into line by offering them a stark choice between gold or lead. Nevertheless, avoid thinking that the Mexican and South Amerikan underworld ever became anything but hired hands of the big dawgs in the United States government and their partners in the banking industry, who always remained in a position to destroy their underlings’ smuggling and money laundering operations through tighter control of U.S. borders and/or by making it extremely difficult to launder the mountains of small-denomination bills which the traffickers had to deal with.
In fact, that’s what happened when then-president George Bush, Sr., ordered the invasion of Panama, which was/is a major offshore money laundering hub, after hired hand Gen. Manuel Noriega had become unruly in 1989. Plus, these hired hands would insure that their chosen corrupt politicians would always win in Mexico’s elections by distributing the planeloads of money that the South Amerikan gangsters and government/military partners would make available as overhead. But more important for the United States, a major part of the proceeds would be pumped into the Mexican economy in order to forestall the looming bankruptcy.
Consequently by the middle 1990’s the Mexican underworld had established the superpowerful Gulf, Juarez, Guadalajara, Sinaloa and Tijuana cartels. Moreover, the underworld had consolidated its power by not only controlling who all were elected to key political posts in Mexico, but had also perfected the art of bribing key local, state and regional police heads as well as strategic generals in Mexico’s armed forces. Check out the movies Traffic, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Antonio Banderas/Selma Hayek’s Desperado. Once again, after the fact, you’ll see Hollywood making money by spilling the beans. But you should not let the stunt work lull you into thinking there’s no substance to the plots!
Remember: Mexico’s cartels wouldn’t be able to function without the collaboration and protection from the highest levels within the U.S. establishment.
Just as the CIA has openly admitted it was a drug merchant during an earlier period, you can believe nothing has changed-except partners! The hilarious part is that none of the wannabe real gangstas in the U.S. know that in reality they’re low-paid, low level CIA flunkies without pensions or benefits; or they can’t wait until they get out of prison to become undercover government agents-slingin’ crack. Alas, most people think it’s crazy to believe that the government of the U.S. would allow its cities and small towns to be flooded with cocaine from South Amerika. Even the wannabe gangstas don’t really believe that. They prefer to think that such ideas are good for conspiracy junkies and cling to the illusion that they are more than just pawns on the chessboard.
Further, if one does not get beyond the idea that this whole thing was just a plot to destroy the Black and Brown peoples-a favorite, though shortsighted theory-there’s no way to see just how deep the drug game really is. I repeat: the main objective was to pump billions of dollars into the Mexican economy in oder to avoid a complete meltdown and the subsequent fleeing to the U.S. of sixty or more million Mexicans out of its ninetyplus million inhabitants. This would have been a crisis that would have dwarfed the numbers who are just beginning to make their presence known!
Actually, the big dawgs in the U.S. probably didn’t know just how they were gonna control the fallout that would inevitably accompany their cocaine/crack tax. They routinely tax alcohol, gambling (from the lotteries to the casinos), and even prostitution in certain areas, don’t they? So yeah, it was a clandestine operation to use cocaine to rescue Mexico and stave off an economically induced invasion of the U.S. by its destitute populace.
The Mexican people, especially its Indigenous population, were made poverty-stricken by 500 years of colonialism, slavery, peonage, neo-colonialism and the theft of one-third of their country by the United States in the 19th century.
Sadly, though, our First Wave’s degeneration into the glamorization of gangsterism, the Second Wave’s hunger for respect and recognition that was fueling the senseless gang carnage, the Hip Hop generation’s ability to provide the youth with vicarious fantasies to indulge their senses with the hypnotic allure of the temporary power that the drug game could bring them-led the youth in the United States back to emulating the First Wave’s Superfly and Scarface days. Others also see that: My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there’s a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in Black people. The best example is Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hip hop…Hip hop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced-crack helped birth hip hop.
Now, I’m part conspiracy theorist because you can’t develop something that dangerous and it not be planned. I don’t think crack happened by accident…Crack offered a lot of money to the inner city youth who didn’t have to go to college. Which enabled them to become businessmen. It also turned us into marksmen. It also turned us comatose. (Ahmir Thompson, aka Quest Love, “The Believer”, in Never Drank the Kool-Aid, op. cit.; also, “The Believer-Interview with Ahmir Thompson“). With the deft moves of a conjurer, the big dawgs in the U.S. seized upon all of this and began to nudge these elements around on the international chess board-within their giant con game. Moreover, these big dawgs in the United States had very little choice where to start their triage in order to gain some relief from their manufactured domestic crisis.
I’ll tell you why.
Cocaine in its powder and crack forms is so addictive that the cultures that use them regularly-the rich and famous, the Hollywood Set, corporate executives, lawyers, doctors, weekenders, entertainers, athletes, college kids, suburbanites, hoodrats, hustlers, pipers, etc.-bring a guaranteed demand! In most ways, it could be argued, the effect has been the same as with alcohol and tobacco, which have never been successfully suppressed in the U.S. It follows then that despite all of their propaganda about Just Say No and the bogus War on Drugs, the big dawgs never had any intention of even trying to eradicate the use of cocaine. In fact, crack had turned their lower class neighborhoods into lucrative mainstays of the big dawgs’ alternative taxing scheme At the same time, however, the Black and Brown communities were becoming major headaches that if left unchecked could eventually evolve into a real strategic threat!
In contrast to the relatively tranquil non-Black/Brown communities, which used more, mostly powder, cocaine, the trade in the Black and Brown hoods and barrios was accompainied by an exponential increase of drug-related violence especially after the gangs got seriously involved. Now, as I’ve pointed out, the gangs were mainly just pursuing respect prior to getting involved with hustling drugs. And the carnage connected to that was not a real concern to the big dawgs. But the crack/cocaine trade was different from the earlier dumping of heroin in those communities which was accompanied by the comparatively isolated violence of the Black Mafia-style groups. That violence, though terrifying, was also more selective. The more widespread availability of crack and assault weapons led the big dawgs to understand that if they didn’t aggressively deal with the ultra-violent inner city drug gangs, the latter would eventually move to consolidate their gains by forming South Amerikan and Mexican-style cartels. Afterward, they, like their Mexican forerunners, could gradually take over inner city politics for themselves once they realized that the money and power would not of themselves provide them with the kind of respect and dignity they sought.
To understand why not, just observe the rich and famous hip hop artists who continue to wild-out because they sitll lack the respect and dignity that comes with struggling for something other than money or power: in short, some type of (political or higher) cause.
Anyway, the hip hop generational favorite TV drama The Wire lays out the entire phenomenon pretty much as it had earlier played itself out in Baltimore and other urban areas. In fact, the fictional TV series derives its realness from an earlier long-running expose featured in a Baltimore newspaper (another after the fact but still useful piece of work to study). Indeed, the parts of that show which depict earlier years of the Black gangs getting deep into the crack trade clearly illustrate my points about the gangs evolving into proto-cartels-and then being triaged before maturing into real strategic threats, thereby leaving the crack trade intact.
It was set up as a tool to neutralize the Second Wave before its members woke up to the fact that, despite their money and power they were being used: played like suckers, a rub that the more astute big dawgs feared that money would not soothe. Thus, all of your draconian gun-related and mandatory sentencing laws were first formulated on the federal level, where most of the big dawgs have their power, and then forced upon most of the states. This was to insure that the Second Wave would never be able to consolidate any real power. Precisely because the latter were proving themselves to be such ruthless gangstas, in imitation of their Hollywood idols, coupled with the power they derived from their share of the undercover tax being extracted from their communities, the ruling classes took the position that they should be triaged before they got too big, a period which averaged from one to three years in a run, and that everything they acquired should be taken.
The martyred hip hop icon The Notorious B.I.G. put it all together in his classic song, rightly titled Respect:
Put the drugs on the shelf/Nah, I couldn’t see it/Scarface, King of New York/I wanna be it…Until I got incarcerated/kinda scary…Not able to move behind the steel gate/Time to contemplate/Damn, where did I fail?/All the money I stacked was all the money for bail. (“Biggie Smalls”, The New York Times,1994, in Never Drank the Kool-Aid, op. cit.)
Let’s get another thing straight!-like the angle that continues to have shortsighted individuals chasing ghosts about why powder cocaine and crack are treated so differently. In the big dawgs’ calculations, there is no reason to punish harshly the powder cocaine dealers and users in the same manner as the crack crowd.
Racism has not been the driving motive; rather it was the armed threat posed by these proto-cartels!
The big dawgs witnessed a clear example of what might come by way of the Jamaican Posses that cropped up in the Black communities. These young men from the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora were also a consequensce of the degeneration of those regions’ lower classes’ attempts to throw off the economic and social effects of their former slavery and colonial oppression. Led by the socialist Michael Manley and inspired by the revolutionary music of Bob Nesta Marley (which can be glimpsed in the later movies, Marked for Death with Steven Segal, and Belly with DMX and Nas), the Jamaican Posses were the Black Mafia on steroids! Moreover, despite their quasi-religious nationalism and their ability to operate with heavily armed soldiers in the U.S. and the Caribbean, their ten thousand or so members were nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands in the wings of the Black and Brown communities!
The cry from the big dawgs’ mouthpieces in Congress was about the gunplay, not so much the drugs. What was not said, however, was the big dawgs’ anxieties about stopping these gunslingers before they got over their mental blocks about using their weapons against the police-or the system. Stop them while they’re hung up on imitating their Hollywood and Euro-Mafia icons who made a mantra out of not using their weapons against the police. Indeed, with a few exceptions, the Second Wave allowed itself to be disarmed and carted off to prison like pussycats! In addition, to appease some of the conservative segments in the U.S. which were upset about capitalism’s globalization drive, the big dawgs dangled the prospect of thousands of new jobs for the rural communities which were being destroyed by it (hence, the Prison Industrial Complex and its neo-slavery).
Therefore, we must struggle against the shortsighted idea that racism alone is the driving motive which has fueled the construction of the Prison Industrial Complex. Instead, if you do a follow-up and add your own research, you’ll be able to document the who, when, where and how the big dawgs set everything in motion; as well as how they continue to use us as pawns in their giant international con game.
Conclusion, ask yourself the following questions:
1. How can we salvage anything from how the people of the First and Second Waves allowed their search for respect and dignity to degenerate into gangsterism?
2. In what ways can we help the Next Wave avoid our mistakes?
3. What can we do to contribute to documenting who the real
big dawgs are behind the drug trade?
4. Why have they never been held accountable?
5. How come our families and communities have been the only ones to suffer?
6. How can we overcome our brainwashing?
7. How can we truly gain respect and dignity?
8. In what ways can we atone for our wrongs and redeem ourselves, families, and communities?
9. What are some ways to fight for restitution and reparations for all of those harmed by the government-imposed undercover drug tax?
10. How can we overturn the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and finally abolish legal slavery in the U.S.?
Once you answer those questions and begin to move to materialize your conclusions, then you will have made the choice between Liberation or Gangsterism: Freedom or Slavery.
By way of references here is a list of recommended reading:
1. The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
2. We Want Freedom, by Mumia Abu Jamal
3. Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur
4. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, by Elaine Brown
5. Blood in My Eye, by George Jackson
6. We Are Our Own Liberators: On The BLA, by J. A. Muntaquim
7. Liberation, Imagination & the Black Panther Party, by Kathleen Cleaver & G. Katificas
8. Black Brothers, Inc.: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia
9. Monster: The Autobiography of a L.A. Gang Member, by Sanyika Shakur (From gangster into liberator)
10. Dark Alliance, by Gary Webb (documents how the CIA introduced crack into the U.S.)
11. Lost History, by Robert Parry (an even more in-depth expose of the CIA and cocaine)
12. Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family, Charles Bowden (the U.S. and Mexican governments’ partnership with the drug cartels)
13. Inspector General’s First and Final Reports on Iran-Contra and the Illegal Drug Trade, posted on the CIA’s official website (the U.S. government’s admissions about its dealing drugs)
15. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration, by D. S.
Hassey, Jorge Durand and Nolan J. Malone (how the Mexican
economy collapsed while the Drug Enforcement
Administration admitted that 85% of the drugs shipped from
Mexico got across the U.S. border-with no action taken)
Original artwork was created for this piece by Siri: thank you!
by DGR News Service | Jul 25, 2020 | Gender, Male Violence, Women & Radical Feminism
Trinity La Fey writes of sharing walls with abusers, of poverty and work, of finding radical feminism, and of navigating relationships in the midst of a patriarchal society.
By Trinity La Fey
Background is always tedious; I’ll try not to bore. Poverty, racism and sexism were not things I gradually discovered. I spent early years with a ranch-based family, that I had no idea I wasn’t related to, that called me their n!&*$r baby when I reflexively braided my hair into manageable bits. We were all pale as the moon, all American mixed. Their racism confused me because I knew that we were not 100% whatever white was. Children get it. Coming from ranch families that had the grandmother trauma of the depression made the family frugal to the point of neglect. The single man coming from this environment who was responsible for the lives of my brother and I was destitute. There was no one to mitigate his desperate rage and isolation, or inherited, old-timey sexism. We had the lot of landing with a genuine psychopath, but those circumstances would have pushed even the most outstanding person. Because the level of violence and impunity was so extreme, however, there was just no getting out of it (sane or otherwise) without putting a few things together, both about how social power works and the difference between self-discipline, or self-control and say, punishment or manipulation.
Having made it out early, I was also dubiously blessed with the rare experience of living for extended periods of time with all kinds of arrangements: all males, except me; all older women, except me; all women of mixed ages; mixed sexes of different ages; mixed sexes of the same age; and living alone.
When I was outed as a lesbian, at thirteen, it was the most beautiful word I had ever heard. Sure, I was a pariah and I walked down the overcrowded halls of my middle school with my hands frozen in dread that they might graze someone in a way that would make it worse, but I knew that what I felt with her was nothing like I could ever feel with a male, any male, ever. Lesbian. I describe my felling toward men at that time like the glazed eyes of a dead fish. Nothing. I had experienced men and boys and really tried (like a well-trained pretty, pretty, princess sex-kitten). They were just irredeemably disappointing. Same when you get a massage: a woman just knows where and how in a way that men cannot. I’ve no doubt it’s the same for men with men. Over time, maybe it was hormones, maybe it was predation’s flattering persistence, but I did get to finding some of them kind of cute again. I should’ve left it there. They rarely did me anything but harm. By the time I left Narcotics Anonymous, at seventeen, I’d put in eighteen months. By the time I was eighteen, I’d done pretty much everything there was to do out there, for a bookworm.
Poverty is a Wall
A big, big, big, big wall. Barely graduating in between my busy schedule of getting kicked out of places, I knew that I could not afford college, even as the elders that I loved did not. I came from depression trauma people. You never, ever get into debt. So I skipped it. I had been working, after all, since I could remember. I knew what I could make in my little food service wage job that I would feel stuck at until I risked leaving for a slightly less horrid wage job that would have its own special mindfuck lying in wait, until it went under, and over and over. Poor is something that cannot be explained. I was a pedestrian. Unless you have lived in America (not NY, NY) without a car, there can be no understanding. It changes your brain. Like working in service (particularly food service): if you haven’t done it out of need, you cannot know what it is to submit, in this way: to sacrifice pride and dignity while simultaneously pretending to keep face, for a living. It is true in a much more profound way when it comes to pornography and prostitution. There were moments during my time in the industry where I balked, when I wanted to quit and wasn’t able. Some coercion was external, but then sometimes my training just kicked in and stole the voice right out of me. That was not only true “professionally” I recognized.
When I fell in love, at eighteen, with a lesbian couple, there was a lot in the way. Falling in love is a real thing for me. At the time, I’d come from this Conversations With God kick, retrospectively for survival. I cultivated affections wherever I felt them, advocating for open relationships and demanding it in my own. By then, my partner was the guy who didn’t go to the strip club with the guys when they turned eighteen. I made it clear that I didn’t want children and that I would never marry. He agreed and we went on to have thirteen tumultuous years together that taught me three things: in America, if you care about the person that you are having sex with and they have no one else, you need medical access to them that you cannot get unless you are married; everything you do wrong in the beginning, your partner will do wrong in the middle, but if you handle that well, the ending may be prolonged; and, male culture is real and men hide it from women when we learn to see it, then attempt to silence women when we teach ourselves to talk about it. Even the cute ones. We had, none of the four of us, learned any of this yet. My love for this couple taught me so many things: even radicals are territorial; even women loving women can act out gendered violence; I am not immune to jealously; substance abuse is abuse and leads to abuse; and, women have trauma that men don’t have. Men’s dehumanization is sometimes complete even to themselves and still, as a class, there just isn’t the level of crazy-making bullshit for them to deal with all the goddamn time that will give them even the baseline female stress until they go to prison or war. I didn’t understand that when I was with girls, when we were only just beginning to process and experiment. Even with all that surviving girlhood cost, we still had hope kinda’. Now I got it: they were acting out their respective abuse with all the subtlety and skill of people who knew what they were doing. “I met her when I was seventeen, Trin.” one said to me, well on her way to a scene straight out of The Feminist Mystique. They definitely understood the master’s tools. We just didn’t know how to not use them.
The love and the shock, the violence of it coming this time so unexpectedly, the resignation, the loss and change demanded of all of us from that experience changed me in a way I didn’t know I could change again (but have come to appreciate will happen again and again). The other woman that survived that relationship is, I hear, happily married to a woman she loves and has (hopefully still) no warrants out for her arrest. I have fallen in love with no woman since. I thought, for a time, that it was protective, or somehow an unconscious choice I had made. After all, how could I not be attracted to women? It just never came to love again. I still love her and I know I always will: the kind of love no man can know. I know that we are better apart.
Then Came the Epiphanies
Things a self primed by Howard Zinn and Daniel Quinn could not anticipate. Another aspect of poverty, though not limited to it, is that of sharing walls with abusers. There was not a single building in which I lived (and I’ve lived in more than my share) where abuse did not occur. I remember so clearly the way it first came to me. I had tried everything: cops, social services, spells, yelling, inquisition, helpful offers, intrusion, song, shame, public letters. At each new space, an old option had been considered, tried and discarded. I was standing in front of a window, losing vision, hearing it fade, going still and numb as can happen. I saw an individual life’s accumulated sexual terror, like a ground zero, from which a golden-grey shockwave of mangled souls was spreading out past the horizon in all directions. Visions are hard to describe or convey, like books are to movies, but I understood something that all the violation I had seen and endured could not make me understand. The scope, the breadth of it was so vast, so deep, so impersonal that I finally got it. Then again with Darfur. Then again with human trafficking. Then again with Juarez. Then again with porn. Each next-day, ashen-faced me was an increasingly different person along a trajectory I could not see.
About halfway through my twenties, internet access was finally available to me in the home. It was a slow YouTube crawl (ongoing) to find my people, although I didn’t know at the time that’s what I was doing. I would’ve just said I was doing research, because sifting through the chaff factory that is the internet was very educational. Not bothering with social media, I came in with just enough immunity to not get too distracted. I’d been following the work of Chris Hedges (whose speeches are excellent background for me) for years by the time he gave me the gift. It was an interview with Lee Lakeman and Alice Lee during which he said, and I heard for the first time in my life, the name of Andrea Dworkin. A researcher oughtn’t need to be told twice. I listened to all of her available speeches. Then I read all of her non-fiction. Then the non-fiction of the other second and first wave women (still at it; what a library our forewomen have made!), whose lectures were oases of helpful vocabulary, theory and reassurance.
Maybe it was just my wyrd, but considering how deliberately I made my conscious choice, before I found radical feminism, to never be with another man, I suppose I should’ve seen him coming, but I didn’t. When I met my future husband, in my thirties, I had finally gotten access to some public assistance that had helped me get out of a situation. Invasive, humiliating, void of human consideration or respect for human dignity, the system was not a favored lifestyle choice. It was a double-bind between having my home invaded every six months, while being periodically psychologically terrorized, or, being consistently psychologically terrorized and periodically having my body invaded. I chose the former. I don’t know what it is like to be stigmatized for the color of my skin, but I do know what it is like to be dismissed as trash. When black women organized to talk about how they cannot afford to be separatists, I partially understand why. The men I have loved, who have also been discarded, are not people I am prepared to stop working or associating with because, on a practical level, we need each other. We physically, materially, cannot do without each other; we are often too weak of clout, even inside our own sex-castes, to have any longevity, let alone political voice. We die young, more often publicly and saddled with stigma rightfully belonging to The Bum on the Plush. When I fell in love with my future husband, it was not like anything I’d experienced. I had a vision. Radical feminism wasn’t on my radar yet and I honestly thought he was gay. He was too fully human. He still doesn’t understand what I mean. Those who know, know. The way I feel about him, the way he looks at me, the way I am made certain of his respect and admiration is something I know is rare and something I value and nothing I would sacrifice to any ideology. He is real to me back.
Rage is a Language Hard to Hear Through
If I had found radical feminism before meeting him, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. He would’ve been invisible to me and I would’ve forfeited all these glorious opportunities to be proven right or wrong about him, and men: to be disappointed and to be surprised. As it stood, we learned about it together. Though I carried all the initiative, he was a pretty good sport about being educated on the nature of his status as oppressor early on. Classic: I do all the work and he gets all the credit and praise for not throwing a tantrum at the suggestion of his need to change. We would watch Julie Bindel talk about how men can only be allies and he would just listen and accept. I would ask him for feedback and conversation and he would just listen and accept. The cop-outs didn’t take long to crop up; not everyone has the drive and stamina for this that I do. Even women. Still, I smell a cop-out and tend to pounce and so it was that I learned his limits as an ally and mine as an effective communicator. It is easy to say that it is not my responsibility to educate him, that we should’ve been important enough to warrant interest without coaxing, because that is true. It is also true that rage is a language hard to hear through. Like any female socialized into femininity, I have some pretty dysfunctional communication habits, especially around confrontation. Like I have specifically learned, I tend to go from Placation-Station to Gorgon with very little fair warning or opportunity given to make things right. How does anyone work with that? That is unworkable. This man seriously impresses me. I once saw him call a Coopers Hawk out of the sky. A wild one. He has my mother’s birthday. Day, not year. He is younger than I am. He scored a fucking zero to my full A.C.E. score. His experience of life is a mystery to me. I am infuriated by his lack of curiosity about me. He considers it respectful. When I tell him things, he listens and accepts. When I ask him things, he is afraid of me. He knows how I am. He doesn’t know that I understand that women are fully human in the worst ways too; that in our respective searches for the way, we have all done harm. We work on trusting each other to have these conversations. We both have messed that up too. We inch back toward it: the conversation.
By aligning with him in any way, I risk fundamentally in ways he will never be vulnerable to or fully understand. I married him and so forfeited my meager assistance for a much better deal. No more home invasions or periodic psychological terror, plus, I get to live with my best friend. But what about body invasion? Is it radical enough just to be able to ask the question? I would argue that you have to be able to ask the question and be able to say no. What about the patronization inherent in the very clear reality of my financial dependence? It affords me a better living situation and greater opportunity with more ease than I was able to scramble for myself. Must that not also mean that I will be less likely to risk his hatred or indifference? I would say fuckin’ please. Of course it does.
I decided that I would read Intercourse aloud to him, who has ADHD and cannot sit still for a second. After watching the panel Julia Long had put together of women speaking about it, I had some idea of what I was getting us into, but hadn’t read it yet. Whatever it was, we were going to do it together goddamnit. That’s when that magick started. He really started to annoy me. The cop-outs were a sharp noise to me now. Un-real dude. Now how are we gonna’ get anywhere if it’s like this? I would read a chapter and he would listen. I would try to get as many in as possible before he would beg off, my mouth dry and fumbling, not knowing when I’m going to get him back into a sitting position. It went on like that, passionate Andrea Dworkin chapter after disturbing chapter, until we hit the one. When I read The New Woman’s Broken Heart, the whole book was like that: there was a different person on the other side of that book, a more integrated, sober, resolute person. Just like all the other times, only this time. But every one of her books has a chapter that does that to me. When I got to that chapter for me in Intercourse, I could feel in the room how I was bigger, like I was filling up that whole room with my grief and recognition, like a radiant body whose skin stretches thin past the walls. I could feel him inside of that, bewildered and seeing me for the first time as I am and have been. He got it. Then forgot it. Because joy and enlightenment are fleeting and we have things to do, all of us. I get it.
Patriarchy: We Are Bound to Fail
But now, there is a frame of reference. Now there is, at least, some honesty and the conversation becomes possible. The question has been asked. He is not the only one who, from time to time, needs to be called out; neither is he the most frequent one to give feedback or the worst one at receiving it, between us. My idea and expression of sexuality changed dramatically with that book, as did his accordingly. How could they not? There had to be an accepted ‘no’ for the question to be real. When prodded for feedback about my decisions about what to build and what to destroy, he says he just accepts. He often has wisdom beyond me. I have feedback about everything.
Even though he wouldn’t have stood a chance if I’d been ‘properly’ educated, I had to laugh when Germaine Greer called herself ‘incurably heterosexual’. Seriously, if there was a cure for love, I would have found it, before radical feminism, instead of my husband. For all the horror, it didn’t reveal any one atrocity so much as help to integrate my story into ours. With the assistance of this theoretical framework it is impossible to ignore my own glaring domestication in the lack of address I have to that second problematic certainty: ability by the grace of another is not true ability, financial or otherwise. I can do things he could never do (not just make babies). I know things he will never have the opportunity to know (besides cramps). Inside this patriarchal framework, we are bound to fail, to be subject to all the predictable pitfalls, to feel our way toward the conversation in the darkness. We can but do our best. He brings home more scrilla. I refuse to clean up after him. He insists on watching Steven Universe in the middle of the damn night and Golden Girls in the evening. I handle crises situations very well. He can take instruction very well in a crisis. I know that I put the light in his eyes. He will never be my political focus. I will always have to battle on the personal and political front with him as my partner. He is an ally I remain proud of.
Sources:
by DGR News Service | Jul 3, 2020 | Male Supremacy, The Problem: Civilization, Women & Radical Feminism
This article was originally a talk given in 2004 in North Carolina by historian Gerda Lerner, who was 84 years old at the time. Gerda describes the creation (social construction) of patriarchy based on hierarchy and enslavement. She describes how this system is antiquated and dangerous to men and women.
HISTORY MATTERS: A ‘Brief’ History of Patriarchy
By Dr. Gerda Lerner
I’m doing something very difficult today and that is I’m going to talk about 2,500 years of history in 50 minutes. So, you will have to accept on faith that the facts I’m citing are amply proven by examples, but I can’t give you the examples. They are in the book, but I think in the discussion next week we will have a chance to go into more concrete examples. And what I was, what I’m trying to tell you also, is that studying the ancient near East, which is the area around in which all the trouble is going on now – the current day Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia between the Euphrates and the Tigris – which is where Western civilization started – it’s very interesting for a historian because the sources are very much more plentiful than our sources are for say 13th century Europe. And the reason is that the people there wrote on clay tablets and clay tablets don’t destruct as paper does – and as papyrus does – so we have tens of thousands of pieces of evidence for everything that I’m going to say.
It’s a very rich area for research. I was interested in this book in finding out whether there is a history of patriarchy possible. Whether it’s possible to do a history. Is it a historic construct? And the reason, of course, is that in everything we are taught, we are taught by traditional history that women are in some way essentially different from men and are designed to perform different functions. And when we question that, we are always told, “Well, it’s always been like that.” And depending on the religious affiliation – it’s either God given or Nature given.
I wanted to see whether that can be challenged with historical evidence. And so, I’m starting with the first division within human society which occurred as soon as human beings lived in groups and that is, of course, the division between men and women. The obvious differences between men and women are there; they are recognized by human beings and they were always incorporated in a sexual division of labor. Okay? Now, I just want to anticipate my final finding. Namely, what I’m trying to prove to you is that patriarchy is a historical system. It was created by human beings. It has a historical beginning. And it has an end. That may be news to you. *laughter from audience.*
Established over a period of nearly 2,500 years, and I roughly date that period from 3,100 before the common era to 600 BCE. Now 600 BCE is the period in which all the major monotheistic religions are already written down and established, in which Greek philosophy is developed, Greek science is developed, and that’s the period when, in other words, patriarchy is firmly established. Now, the sexual division of labor already occurred in the Neolithic tribal villages that arose in that area. And, we have some evidence on the lifespan of the people at that time. And it was a very, very short lifespan. For males it was 35 years, and for females 30 years. That’s rounded up a little bit.
Now if you remember that in 30 years, the age at which girls reached puberty was later than it is now. It always has been getting earlier since historic time. So even if we dated it to 14, a woman had 16 years in which she could bear children, alright? Infant mortality rates were about 80% at the time, so 20% of the children would survive from the first year of life, which meant that a woman had to have pregnancies practically every year or every year and a half in order to have two or three children survive into adulthood. Okay?
And, of course, what it means in practical terms, if those groups in which the social arrangements did not work for the survival of children, those are the groups that disappeared. Right? So the sexual division of labor made it absolutely essential for groups to develop a system by which women could raise children. And now generally when we are told about the subordination of women, and we are told why it happens, we are told that it has to do with the fact that women “bear” children. I find that this is not – that “child bearing” – is NOT the issue. The main issue is child “nurture.”
Human children need many years of care before they can survive – and in more primitive conditions, more years of care.
And so, the long nursing and the effective mothering are the key issues in the survival of tribes. And as a result, the essential division of labor that we find in most of the early societies is that women who are…women take care of the hunting and gathering around the area, which, in fact, supplies as much as 70 or 80% of the nutrition of the group, and men take care of the hunting and then later on that turns into warfare – defending against other tribes.
This – both of these functions – when needed for group survival – and the sexual division of labor were an effective means of assuring group survival under very harsh conditions and IT DID NOT CONNOTE INEQUALITY. And we know that from many evidences of graves of early settlements where male and female graves are of the same type, and so forth. The next thing that happens is that little groups of tribes in settlements begin to encroach upon each other and they need to find a way in which they can stop from constantly having warfare.
What develops is the exchange of women.
Women are exchanged for two reasons: to foster inter-tribal relations and also later on to assure tribes that they have an efficient supply of women who can raise children. Now this exchange of women takes place in all known societies and it is very often marked by a shift from what we call matriliny to patriliny. Now matriliny is the way in which society is organized so that you reckoned the descent through the mother, and the couple lives in the location of the mother’s home. Very often the husband of the daughters will come occasionally as a visitor and not even live there. Matriliny was very, very widespread in all early settlements and then in the period I’m describing, we see a shift to patriliny – which is also patrilocality. The descent begins to be reckoned through the father. The bride, or the wife, leaves the home of her parents and goes to the location of the father.
Now, one example of the early arrangement we find in the Bible in the story of Jacob who goes to Laban’s house to live there for seven years to get his daughters. So that’s still matrilocality. And then he takes his wife and children, at the time that patrilocality is established, and he takes them to the house of his father. So there is a perfect example of proof of a shift. What is very interesting is as we study the evidence that while this process takes place everywhere, it never is reversed. We have no record of patriliny changing to matriliny. Okay? So you can say that this is sort of a historic development.
You might ask, why were women exchanged and not men?
Or why were not children exchanged? If you wanted to secure the friendship of another tribe and you gave your children – this was done for example in the middle ages among ruling families, they often exchanged the children of the rulers to secure a peace. Well the reason for that is essentially that (this is an assumption, an hypothesis) one could not be sure by exchanging men, that they would stay and that they would be peaceful. And they didn’t know how to control the men, but if you had women, you knew that by exchanging, that the moment they were pregnant and had children they stayed with their children. And so the ability of women, the biological ability, and the hardwired ability of women to nurture children made them predisposed to being cast in this role. So in that sense there is some biological basis. But that does NOT mean that that role had to be cast as an inferior role. And that’s just my point.
At a certain point, this becomes changed to an inferior role. Other explanations that have been given for the rise of patriarchy are that it had to do with the fact that men invented animal husbandry – out of the hunting role. They learned how to domesticate animals, and because they learned how to domesticate animals, the theory goes, man, the hunter, acquired some wealth in animals and then started controlling the world. This is ahistorical because animal husbandry was invented in the region we’re talking about about 8000 BC. And we have evidence, hard evidence through diggings, of relatively egalitarian societies in the region that practiced animal husbandry 2000-4000 years later. So, this could not be the reason. This is not what happened.
So, but it did happen that men learned to domesticate animals and that the sexual division of labor became reinforced by that, very strongly.
Now, at the time of about the period that I’m starting to talk about, 3000 BCE, there were city states being formed in this region, in Ur, in Lagash, in Kish, in Sumer, and we have very good records from those. And what we find when these city states are formed is that they already have developed a more elaborate division of labor. Namely, there are people who specialize in military functions, there are people who specialize in the arts and crafts, and there are people who specialize in taking care of the community and hunting and gathering.
What we find developing in these early settlements is a new role for women of the elite. And, I’m talking here about the wives of rulers. In these city states, you have the temple which is the big center for activity, and the reason for that is that in that region, you need to have large-scale watering systems in order to do agriculture. And these watering systems require a supply of labor and they are managed by the temple – by the temples. And so there’s a temple elite, and gradually you see some individuals that begin to function as rulers.
These rulers are – most of them are -usurpers.
That is their claim to fame – is that they won in some warfare against the neighboring tribe and that the king gave them land and so now they are the men of the king and to show their legitimacy, they usually claim that they are also related to the Goddess. I’ll talk about that later. But, one of the troubles that they have is that they are constantly engaged in warfare. And when they are away being usurpers, they could be easily replaced, you know. And so they’re very insecure, so they set up their wives as deputies. And that’s the role of the wife as deputy, or called the stand-in wife.
And I just want to point out to you, without being able to give you all the examples that I could easily give you, that that role is with us to this day. Alright? It’s the role of the woman of the elite, like you had in say the Gandhi family in India – if they are running out of boys, the women take over. Okay? These women have tremendous power. They conducted warfare. They collected taxes. They bought and sold slaves. They had tremendous power, but they also were very vulnerable because, at that same time, we already have documents from that time from the city of Ur and from others, that the men had already begun to keep harems.
To kings it was a sign of status and legitimacy that the bigger your harem, the more powerful you were. And these women could be replaced at any time by a second wife or a concubine if they no longer sexually pleased their husbands. And there are many cases where we have letters where these women are set aside – these powerful women.
So what you have here is a prototype of a patriarchal role for elite women.
They give up their sexual freedom, but in exchange they get a lot of power – but only so long as they sexually serve and reproductively serve their husband. If they don’t have boys, for example, if they don’t give birth to sons, they can be set aside. Out. Out of nowhere. And they can be, there are cases where they are imprisoned, they are set aside. Okay? So this is with us to this day. This elite wife role.
Now, we come to the big change in the Bronze Age. And it is, of course, again, there are many, many things that change, and I have to simplify it very greatly and I’m sorry for that. But the main outstanding thing about the Bronze Age is that due to the fact that you now have bronze tools and weapons, warfare intensifies and becomes much more effective. And more and more people are killed in warfare, on the one hand. On the other hand, you now have bronze tools for tilling the soil and plowing, agriculture comes in. And it is much more efficient – and all of a sudden there is enough food supply so that these small communities can feed other people that they bring in – which before was impossible.
Because of that, and because there’s now a constant need for labor, they develop a system of acquiring that labor.
And the labor that they acquire are slaves. And, but before that, I just need to say that this whole agricultural revolution brings with it a much greater specialization of the economy. It brings with it the development of kingships, so that instead of small city states and tiny tribes, you get sizable kingdoms now, right? And it brings a rivalry between the temple bureaucratic elite, which controls the irrigation system, and the kings. Okay? And that has a great impact also on what develops.
So, for example, at that time there’s one of the rulers, Sargon of Akkad, and he rules over Sumer, Assyria, Elam, and the Euphrates Valley. This is in the middle of the second millennium. And I’m mentioning him because he had a daughter named Enkheduanna, who’s the first known woman poet in the history of the world. She was a great poet, and her work is available to this day. And he set her up as the High Priestess, that was another stand in role for women. If you made her High Priestess, then she could penetrate power in the temple elite. And so the women of the elite were used as pawns.
Of course, the males too. Males didn’t have free choice either.
Now, in this same period, warriors were rewarded with, in other words, successful warriors of the usurper king, in order to consolidate his power, he gave them conquered land and he gave them conquered women. Before that time, whenever there was warfare, and we have very accurate descriptions, they described how they piled up the corpses and they killed everybody. Piles and piles of corpses: men, women, and children were killed.
But after the agricultural revolution, we come to the development of, what I call, the invention of slavery. Alright? This is VERY crucial. And the point here is that because men had already learned that if you exchange women and you either rape them, or you marry them and they have children, they will stay in the family of the conqueror. Because they had learned that, they could transfer that to the conquered enemy. And what is very interesting is that in every society in the world that developed slavery, THE FIRST ENSLAVED PEOPLE WERE WOMEN AND CHILDREN. And what’s really interesting about this, when I first started researching this – I found it almost impossible to believe – I looked at dozens and dozens of sources on the origin of slavery, and they all had that sentence in it. And nobody, NOBODY asked WHY or WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS! THAT’S ALL I DID. I asked WHY? And WHAT’S THE MEANING OF IT? OKAY?
So we have the record that for several hundred years in this area, while they enslaved women and children, they did not enslave the conquered men.
They either killed them, or they mutilated them. They cut their Achilles tendons, they blinded them, they mocked them and branded them. They didn’t know what to do with them, because if a man had been fighting you with a bronze cudgel, right? And you conquered him, and now you brought him home, and you put a tool in his hand that was a stick with a bronze hoe on it and said, “Now work for me for free,” he might very well at night use it for a weapon. And they didn’t know what to do then.
So you had to invent a way in which you could make people enslaved. This was NOT a natural thing, okay? And men learned that you could do that by making the slave a MARKED human being that was denigrated so that he was not considered, he or she was not considered, quite human. You turn him into an “Other.” And this was done by a variety of ways. Very often the people conquered actually looked different, very different race – so racism starts. You know, racism is one of the very bases on which slavery is built.
But even if it was a next door neighbor that looked just exactly like your own tribe – they started cutting their hair differently, or they marked their ears, or they cut off their noses. They did very brutal things. The point was to mark them – as “different”. And then, to construct an idea that because they are different that they are inferior. And they’re not quite human. And once you have done that, then you can – then they found that you could use “difference” and turn it into “dominance”. And,
THAT IS THE KEY MORAL PRINCIPLE OF PATRIARCHY.
AND I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE KEY TO PATRIARCHY COMBINES ALL THE DISCRIMINATIONS IN ONE: You’re different if you’re female, you’re different if you are from a different race, you’re different if you are from a different ethnicity, you’re different, later, if you’re a different religion, and, finally, YOU ARE DIFFERENT IF WE SAY SO.
You know, we create. Welfare mothers? All of a sudden, they are different? They’re not our neighbors? They’re not exactly like us, only they are poor? No, you see. THIS is the essence of the moral principle on which patriarchy is built. And so, the intertwining of the forms of discrimination that are involved in slavery and sexism are so connected from the beginning that you cannot separate them out, and the mistake we have been making in the past 40 years is that everybody’s fighting their own little thing. You cannot abolish this that way. From the beginning it’s been interlocked, alright? And I think that’s the importance of this research.
What this also means, is that once slavery is invented, class is formed in a new way.
I call it in a phrase, class is formed “genderic-ly”. Namely, class is never the same for men and women. The enslaved people, the enslaved men and women and children are used as the exploited labor. That’s – they share that. But for women, slavery from the beginning means sexual services and reproductive services to the conquered males. And it does not mean that for males. For some periods, there are examples where males are used that way – in the Roman Empire and so forth. But those are the exceptions. And that’s the second principle. For woman subordination and oppression always involves the control of their sexual and reproductive functions by males or male dominated institutions. And this has not changed in 3,000 years. Okay?
Now, that means also that class – if class is defined as the access to resources, or the access of what the Marxists used to call “the means of production” – but I prefer “resources”, as there are all kinds of resources, then males have direct access to resources. Males of the dominant group have direct access to resources. But women have access to resources only THROUGH the men on whom they depend which is either the men in their family of origin or the men they marry. And this is a very, very BIG difference. So class is NOT the same for men and women and slavery is NOT the same for men and women. Now from here I’m going to a – I feel like I’m on a racetrack – from here I’m going to go to a period at the end of the second millennium and mostly the first millennium BCE when you already have kingships and states and the archaic states are formed.
At that time you have the big major law codes that are available and almost everything I’m saying here is based on the study of the four major law codes.
Mainly the code of Hammurabi, which is put down about 752 BCE, the Hittite and Assyrian law which was created and written down between the 15th and 11th century (you remember that it goes backwards before) and the Hebrew, and I’m mostly basing this on Genesis, which was completely written down in the 7th century BCE. So I’m going to give a quick overview, of how now, after we have – after human beings invented a way to turn difference into dominance and to organize the societies accordingly, that didn’t mean yet that they could get away with a lot of excess or with a lot of rights. That took a long time to develop. It was not a sudden overthrow. It was something that developed over a thousand years in this case.
So, first of all, in the law codes, what we see is before the laws are passed, kinship was the way in which the law took its order. In other words, if there was a crime committed, the head of the kin group – or the males in the kin group would take care of settling it. Usually with some kind of bloodbath, you know – an eye for an eye, or something like that. Gradually, that shifts.
The laws are written, and the laws are written so that the king suddenly starts intervening.
So for example, adultery. Adultery is a crime that only women can commit in these societies. There is no adultery for males, they can sleep around as much as they want. Women’s adultery is usually punishable by death. A very brutal death. But we see the difference between, at first, used to be the males in the family would kill their sister, daughter, whoever, to avenge a breach of law that shamed the family. But now in these law codes, it’s put down exactly what is to happen, and they have to go to the court, and the court puts in the punishment. So the state takes over the enforcement of the patriarchal arrangements of marriage.
Now these marriage arrangements vary by class. They are always considered “contracts” between two male heads of families. Nobody has any choice in marriage. Okay? And their – for the upper class group, the father of the bride receives a bride prize from the father of the groom. And that bride prize is, becomes the property of the husband and he has all the rights over it. And, however, he has a big constraint. He cannot sell it or use it for himself because he is obliged to keep that bride prize in case of his death. That is the support for his widow, alright? So the bride prize is a way in which the families assured a common interest for both husband and wife in the marriage, a financial interest, and they give some sort of protection to the widow. But what happens when the widow dies? That money, she can’t dispose of it. It goes to her sons.
So what we see here is the first development of something we are seeing all through historical time, and that is property passes from man to man, but it passes THROUGH women.
That’s the second principle of the patriarchy. So if you want to know what woman’s status actually is, there’s no use just looking at what some woman do – you have to look at the property relations. And you have to look at widowed women. That’s a very crucial way of finding out the actual status of women in a society.
Now the middle class of the ancient near Eastern societies, they don’t have that much property, and they don’t have that much property usually to be able to pay a bride prize for their sons, so what they do is they try and get a marriage for the daughter and the bride prize for their daughter is used to pay for the marriage of the son. So again, the property goes through women, but it’s used for the males in the family.
The lower class, the totally lower class, impoverished people, have, if they need to bury… First of all, they have one loophole that exists in patriarchy, is that if they have a very beautiful daughter, they can perhaps marry her to someone in the upper class. It’s possible for women to change their class status by marriage, but generally, the arrangements are all such that the property of the group, the class as a whole, stays in the class. They encourage people to marry within their class. But the very poor then, what they can do is to sell a daughter into prostitution or slavery and use the money to buy a bride for the son. Or, to go get out of debt, as the debt-slavery develops as an institution. There are many laws about it. If a man is in debt, he can take his wife and children and make them debt-slaves, and with money he can get from them, he can pay his debt.
So property in women and children is legalized as part of the legal institution of the patriarchal state.
Of course you can understand, when you, by the way, any time you open the newspapers and you read about some women in Afghan societies whose fathers are killing them, or whose brothers are killing them because they’ve been raped or disgraced – I mean, that’s the old system still working fine. It’s incredibly…it has an incredible longevity. The virginity of brides and the chastity of wives become a commodity for the family. And that’s how patriarchy starts. Okay? Rape is considered a crime by the rapist against the father of the raped woman or against the husband. And very often the punishment is that the raped woman gets married – has to get married – to the rapist.
So women have an – you can easily confuse that and think that it means women have become enslaved – they have NOT become enslaved. These very same middle and upper class women that I have described to you, in all these law codes, we have a picture of a society in which women are very active commercially. They have many occupations. They have a much higher economic status than 18th century American women, for example. They can buy and sell slaves. They can oppress other people. They can manage businesses – and they do. But yet, everything depends upon their marital and sexual arrangement.
Essentially, to establish patriarchy as a functioning system, men have to guarantee, and the state guarantees, that the sexuality and reproductive power of women is controlled by men and male dominated institutions.
Of course, we could spend a long time, and maybe next week we will, discussing how that still today plays out. And that of course informs feminist attitudes about such questions as abortion and rape. Because what’s involved is a very ancient and very, very important principle that’s the mainstay of this oppressive system. Now, to zoom right through. *laughter* Zooming right along, even in this whole period when all these institutions developed, women still have power. And one of the big powers that women still have in the ancient near Eastern societies is that they served the gods. They serve as priestesses, they serve in the temple, they rule over temples, and in a certain important way – you know, in ethical culture we understand religion as a human construct, and the human construct in religion has always been based on who creates life, who controls death, and who brings sin into the world.
And in the period that I’m talking about, all these societies have a pantheon of gods and goddesses who act very much like human beings, who have all the failings of human beings. In one of the oldest epics, the epic of Gilgamesh, it opens up with the gods bringing Gilgamesh who’s half god and half human to trial because he goes around raping women and it’s creating a disturbance. So you see what I mean. The gods and goddesses have human qualities and they’re equally obnoxious to each other. They conduct warfare, they conduct intrique. So if a person had something wrong with them, and they wanted help, they were as likely to go the the temple of the goddess where the priestess was in charge as to a temple of a god. This all changes. And it changes in the latter part of the first millennium, but it changes in different places at different times depending on the condition. It always changes in one direction only.
The gods and goddesses are replaced by a powerful male god.
It is the storm god, the god of the wind. It’s very interesting. That’s the most powerful god. And all of a sudden, or gradually, the goddess is dethroned and all of a sudden becomes his consort or his wife. That, of course, is the preliminary to, finally, to the development of monotheism, right? And as this development takes place, more and more, you find the creation stories changing so that it is no longer the mother goddess that creates life, and I didn’t have a chance to talk about the mother goddess cult in the Neolithic that’s pervasive. And, those mother goddesses were always also in charge of death.
So the mother goddess, who was in charge of life and death, is now the wife of the storm god. And all of a sudden you learn that it’s the storm god that gives life. And the next thing that you will be told in the Hebrew Bible is that it is God who creates life. God opens the womb of Sarah. God decides who is fertile and not. It’s no longer the Goddess, alright? So the dethroning of the Goddess takes place everywhere, and if you look at it historically, as I did, it takes place when a particular state becomes IMPERIALIST. It’s very interesting. It doesn’t take place in any other time. When the state begins to make claims that it has the right to conquer its neighbors and to rule – as one ruler said, “I rule the four corners of the Earth. God has given me this right.” There we are.
To conclude this sad story.
*laughter from audience* By the time that monotheism develops, by the time you have empires in this region, you have powerful military states that control the lives of their citizens, you see the development of science, Greek science, Greek philosophy, and women by that time have been fairly well removed from contact with the Divine. That also is a process that takes many hundreds of years, but it takes place always in the same directions. So the founders of Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, are very explicit about their view of women: Women are crippled human beings. They are incomplete. They are not quite human. And therefore, you can compare them to slaves. And the comparison is made.
So what we are seeing is, that – now if we talk about two kinds of things that give power – one is the region of actual power – which is militarism and the distribution of land. That’s one source of power for human beings. But there’s another source of power. And that’s the symbol system. What you put into people’s heads. How you explain the world and the relationship to the universe and the meaning of life. Okay? So by the time that men, and IT WAS MEN IN THIS CASE, create the first meaningful symbol system of Western civilization, the subordination of women has been accomplished “in fact” – every place they live. And so it isn’t questioned. It isn’t an issue. They discuss slavery.
They discuss whether it’s right to enslave people, but they do NOT discuss whether women are EQUAL human beings. That comes later.
And so because of that antiquity, by that time then, when the very values of Western civilization are created, the men who create this mental construct, assume the subordination of women as either “Natural” or “God given”. They assume as a verity that God does not speak to women. And that a “male” god creates life and that “sin” was brought into the world by women. Well, by the time you have that mental construct firmly established and men and women believe in it and teach it to their children, nobody can question patriarchy.
And we now add, which I don’t have time to do unfortunately for you, 2000 further years of systematically depriving women of education. Okay? Systematically and in EVERY place in the world. Okay? And then you ask, why aren’t women better off? Why didn’t they start for their struggle for rights sooner? So, in conclusion, patriarchy was established by men and women, I believe. And when it was first established, it served a purpose. I call it the patriarchal bargain that women made. And the bargain was: I give up my sexual freedom. I give up the idea of any, you know, and my reproductive freedom, and in exchange one man or the state will protect me and my children from warfare and will allocate resources to me.
Okay? That’s the bargain. So it was once a good bargain, IN THE NEOLITHIC. *laughter from the audience* We’re no longer living the Neolithic. And what we have is an idea system that’s based on a perfectly wonderful arrangement FOR THE NEOLITHIC. And which is TOTALLY dysfunctional now, OKAY?
WOMEN AND CHILDREN PERISH IN MODERN WARFARE IN EXCESSIVE PREDOMINANCE OVER MALES, OKAY? SO – PROTECTION IS OUT THE WINDOW. We can argue to what extent men provide resources for women. THAT’S ARGUABLE.
My point is that to further existence of patriarchy as it is based on hierarchy, militarism, enslavement, and the constant pitting against each other of one group for the benefit of another, ENDANGERS NOT ONLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN, BUT THE WORLD. IT’S DYSFUNCTIONAL. IT’S OUTDATED. IT CAN BE ABOLISHED.”
Dr. Gerda Lerner (April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was an Austrian-born American historian and woman’s history author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theater pieces, screenplays, and an autobiography. She served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 1980 to 1981. In 1980, she was appointed Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught until retiring in 1991.
Lerner was one of the founders of the academic field of women’s history. In 1963, while still an undergraduate at the New School for Social Research, she taught “Great Women in American History”, which is considered to be the first regular college course on women’s history offered anywhere.
She taught at Long Island University from 1965 to 1967. She played a key role in the development of women’s history curricula and was involved in the development of degree programs in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College (where she taught from 1968 to 1979 and established the nation’s first master’s degree program in women’s history) and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she launched the first Ph.D. program in women’s history. She also worked at Duke University and Columbia University, where she was a co-founder of the Seminar on Women.
