Let's begin with one basic observations about how things work in dominant Western societies:
Misogyny is not only corporately manufactured, but is also promulgated, promoted, heralded, and honored as "sacred" in a society that continually finds new ways to violate and degrade women as a gendered class.
Violence
Male privilege is a complex, vast, endemic matter, a bit like air--hard to notice unless it hits you in the face. If you're a woman living in a home with a man, that happens literally with atrocious regularity. I say this with knowledge that in the U.S. it is now "Domestic Violence Awareness" month. (I think it should be called "Let's Do Something About the Terrible Fact that Men Beat the Shit Out of Women at Home" month, but that's a topic for another post.
Interventions that treat men as the villains and women as the victims have not taken us far. Not all masculinities (or ways of being a man) are harmful to men, women and children. This was the starting point for a three-day workshop organised by the South and Central Asia office of Save the Children-Sweden, which was held in Kathmandu in March 2004 on 'strengthening partnership with men and boys to promote gender equality and end violence against girls and boys'.
After a woman who, fearing for her safety, called herself “Claire,” revealed the disgusting details of a gang rape that was allegedly perpetrated against her by an Australian football team, 100,000 people responded in support of the man who, according to her testimony, orchestrated the gang rape against her.
Yesterday, August 4th, was President Barack Obama's 47th birthday. He chose to celebrate by bringing cupcakes to Helen Thomas, who shares his birthday and was 89. At the same time, my friend Byron Hurt and his wife Kenya Felice had a baby.
This morning, I wake to the news that another man shot three women in Pittsburgh. My friends Jason and Lahia live there - I have been calling and texting, hoping Lahia was not one of the three women killed.
How does it all make sense? What does it all have to do with masculinity? With feminism? Profeminism? Violence prevention?
It’s been a dizzying couple of weeks here in Durham. Rape charges dropped against the lacrosse players. Another survivor’s life poked and prodded by a public that has little interest in her health or happiness. District Attorney Nifong’s scandal. Finnerty and Seligmann invited back to Duke in “good standing.” Survivors of sexual violence re-traumatized by public attacks and re-assertions of one myth about rape after another.
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I am a U.S.-born radical activist and writer who strives toward the realization of women's full human rights. I support radical feminists' humanitarian struggles to end all manifestations of white, heterosexual, and male supremacy, and have done so for the last twenty-plus years. Most of my closest friends during that time have been women systematically harmed by what I not-so-affectionately call Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy (CRAP):
By Kevin Powell
In my recent travels and political and community work and speeches around the country, it became so very obvious that many American males are unaware of the monumental problem of domestic violence in our nation. Since October just ended and was Domestic Violence Awareness Month, this seems as good a time as any to address this urgent and overlooked issue. Why is it that so few of us actually think about violence against women and girls, or think that it’s our problem? Why do we go on believing it’s all good, even as our sisters, our mothers, and our daughters suffer and a growing number of us participate in the brutality of berating, beating, or killing our female counterparts?
Investigations of domestic violence reveal significant relationships between interpersonal violence, masculinity, and gendered power relations. One in five women and one in fourteen men has been physically assaulted by a current or former intimate partner in their lifetime (Tjaden & Thoennes 2000, 25-26). Men’s physical violence against women is accompanied by a range of other coercive and controlling behaviors. Domestic violence is both an expression of men’s power over women and children and a means through which that power is maintained. Men too are subject to domestic violence at the hands of female and male sexual partners, ex-partners, and other family members. Yet there is no ‘gender symmetry’ in domestic violence, there are important differences between men’s and women’s typical patterns of victimization, and domestic violence represents only a small proportion of the violence to which men are subject.
Ever pressured a woman into sex? Mark Layton reflects on his past sexual behaviour and on the steps necessary to change it.