Nov 21

What I learned about men by posting a ‘For Sale’ ad on Kijiji

The ad said $100.  Men offered $70, $80, $90.  Every woman who replied to the ad accepted the stated price.

The ad indicated my location, implying pick-up.  Men asked whether I’d deliver it (all or part of the way) or simply said my location was too far away.  The closest a woman got to that kind of response was ‘Are you ever in North Bay?’  (And the woman who bought it drove the distance deemed by several men to be ‘too far’.)

The ad said nothing about disassembling the item.  Men asked whether I would do that (so they could more easily fit it in their vehicle).  No woman asked for that.

So.  Does this mean that …

Men are more assertive than women?

Men are more demanding that women?

Men feel more entitled (to whatever it is they want) (and maybe even to things they don’t want) (just because) than women?

Men themselves use language loosely (they seldom mean what they say or say what they mean) and so assume others do as well?

So if $100 could mean $70, then $30,000/year could mean $35,000 and ‘no benefits’ could mean ‘Okay, a dental plan’. 

And ‘No’ could mean ‘Yes.’

Nov 18

One way to deal with it (sexism) (in science this time)

“When I go to a venture-capital group of only men,” Nacy said, “I do most of the speaking, and my chief business officer and I watch faces. If they’re incredulous about something I’ve said, he’ll repeat the same thing—and then it’ll be just fine.”

Read the whole article here.

Nov 11

Trying to figure out people’s actions or thinking — banned on Reddit? WTF.

So in addition to all the radfem censorship on reddit …

I posted the following on the AskMen subreddit:

Why do men rape?

That’s my question. Seriously. Why do men rape? I just wrote a novel answering that question, Impact, but I’d like to hear from men. (And perhaps should’ve posted here BEFORE I wrote the novel. Didn’t occur to me.)

I immediately received the message:

Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/AskMen.

Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose.

I assumed it was an automatic removal, and I assumed that it was the word ‘rape’ that triggered the removal (which in itself would be telling—they anticipate getting, or do get, a lot of ‘Which way do you like to rape cunts the best?’ queries … ?).  So I sent a note to the moderators, asking them to please read my post and reconsider.

Then I see received another response:

Your post has been flagged as trying to figure out a specific person’s or group of people’s actions or thinking. 

Seriously?  It’s taboo to try to understand people’s actions or thinking?  WTF.

I decided to experiment and posted the same question on the AskWomen subreddit. 

It was also removed.  Reasons:

Graceless generalizations are not permitted

– People are not a hive mind.

– Speak only for yourself.

Do not

– generalize across all people of a gender, race, or ethnicity

– ask for mind reading

– ask for us to defend/justify other people’s behaviors

– assume that all people in a gender, race, or ethnicity do/think something

– ask for ‘male equivalent’/’female equivalent’ as these would not exist for most things due to different cultural processes

– exceptions: discussion of cultural norms; quotations

Woh.  First, notice the difference.  The women’s response is SO much better.  More detailed, more explanatory …   It is, in a nutshell, indicative of superior thinking. 

And yes, I agree.  The way I’d phrased the question was assuming a hive mind and generalizing across a sex.  I could rephrase it: Why has rape become normalized in our culture?  That would clearly fall into the exception of ‘discussion of cultural norms’ …

Even so, I wonder at the ‘Speak only for yourself’ rule.  Limiting oneself to anecdote is no way to acquire knowledge.  Are we to assume no one knows anything but their own subjective experience?  Could no one have referred me to, say, Smithyman’s 1976 research, recently mentioned in The New York Times?  Or the NFB film, Why Men Rape?  Not to mention Neil Malamuth’s work … And why is it a problem, as it was for the men, to ask for mind reading?  Do people not know their own minds?  Have we become so incapable of introspection?  Or is it, in the second case, that I was asking women to read men’s minds?  Even so, can’t we speculate?  With good reason and evidence? 

Nov 10

Hunting – only men

It’s hunting season again — moose for a week, then deer for two weeks — and I have yet to hear an acceptable justification.

The animals are having enough trouble surviving because of what we’ve done, and what we’re still doing, to the forests.  And now you want to just go out and kill them.

Oh, but we kill only the old and the sick.  We cull the herd and keep it healthy.  First, liar.  One of you shot a moose calf just the other day.  Second, herd?  Seriously?  When’s the last time you saw a herd of moose or deer?  Third, if you were really killing them out of compassion, you’d tranquilize then euthanize them — not shoot them (I doubt one shot from your gun kills them instantly and painlessly).

And my favourite: we like the meat.  Only men would think that their liking, their wanting, something justifies the use of lethal force to get that something.

Nov 06

WLRN podcast: A Feminist Analysis of Christianity

https://wlrnmedia.wordpress.com/2020/11/05/edition-55-a-feminist-analysis-of-christianity/

Nov 01

Out with the literary canon?

I used to think that ‘Out with the literary canon altogether’ was going too far, but now …  Name one work conventionally considered part of the traditional literary canon that does not subordinate women—their existence, their presence, their importance, what they say, what they do …

And so by continuing to grant the work such esteemed status, such legitimacy, we continue to grant women’s subordination legitimacy.

And so the traditional literary canon should be studied—only in a course dedicated to exposing their misogyny.

Oct 31

The Montreal Massacre (and Donna Decker’s Dancing in Red Shoes Can Kill You)

People who are/were shocked by the Montreal Massacre don’t know women’s history.  Men have been killing us for centuries.  Simply because we’re women.  They kill each other too, but in that case, it’s mostly because of their target’s sexual orientation, tribal affiliation, or skin color.  They kill us because of our sex.

Is it more horrible because of that?  Perhaps not.  Yes, 51% of the world’s people are female, whereas only 10% are homosexual, but the target group based on tribal affiliations might be larger than 51% (especially when nations go after each other), and target groups based on skin color are most certainly larger than that (assuming it’s ‘white’ people killing non-‘white’ people). 

Perhaps the horror is that we have been, willingly for the most part, sleeping with the enemy.  For centuries.

Donna Decker’s Dancing in Red Shoes Can Kill You is a must-read.  Especially for those too young to have been aware of the Montreal Massacre in 1989.

“There were men … who hated the idea of women’s equality so much, they were willing to kill in cold blood.  In Canada.”  (p213)

To be clear, whether we’re engineers or prostitutes, whether we’re under ten or over sixty, whether we’re heterosexual or lesbian, whether we’re white or black, whether we’re feminist or not—none of that matters.  All that matters is that we’re female.  (Which in itself should make us all feminist.)  If ever there was a call to arms— 

(And yet, before you pick up that gun—yes, even the one that’s fallen onto the floor out of the man’s hand—know that at least when ‘partners’ are involved, women who kill men spend an average of fifteen years in prison, whereas men who kill women spend about four years in prison.)

“She had [simply] written down [in her column] everything the guy in the coffee shop had said that morning … how he was furious with his feminist girlfriend and all feminists.  She had embellished nothing.  But they had refused to publish it.” (p321) They had called it anti-male.  Note that.  Pay attention to that.  Simply exposing male hatred of women is anti-male.  How do you figure that?  Speaking the truth about men is anti-male?  That means that reality is anti-male.  Hm.  What are you going to do with that?

And men?  If this book doesn’t make you sick, and then determined to fix your brothers, you should, like Marc Lepine, put a bullet in your own head.  (Thank you.)

Oct 29

On being wanted.

Also while reading James Morrow’s The Wine of Violence…

” … a world finally wanted his ideas.” (p119)

That stopped me.  Because even academia, not just the world at large, had never wanted my ideas.  Simply because they come from a female-embodied person.

Maybe that’s why ‘love’ is so much more important to women than to men.  And so too marriage and kids.  It’s the only way they get wanted. (I bet when you read the title of this post, you were thinking about being wanted emotionally, sexually … see?)

Oct 25

On getting paid. Or not.

So I was reading James Morrow’s The Wine of Violence and when I got to “Will the Journal of Evolution publish it?  Publish, it, hell, they’ll make me an editor” (p25), I stopped, puzzled for a moment.  Then it hit me.  To Francis, the character whose thoughts those are, becoming an editor means status and income.  To me, it has just meant more work.  That’s how it is for women.

Case in point: for five years I served on the Ethics Committee of our local hospital.  That meant I attended monthly meetings; I also offered to be on the Education sub-committee, which meant I prepared and delivered a special topics seminar each month, the Consultation sub-committee, which meant I’d meet with physicians who wanted assistance making decisions, and for which I researched and prepared an ethical-decision-making ‘tree’ (for which one of the physicians thanked me profusely, saying it has made such a difference, he was henceforth able to find a way through all the complexities and competing claims…), and the Research sub-committee, which meant I’d meet as needed to discuss research proposals put to the hospital, and for which I researched and prepared, again, a tool for decision-making (which has since been circulated among other hospitals who now use it). 

The nurses, doctors, and hospital administrators on the committee were paid because their participation was on ‘hospital time’; the minister and lawyer on the committee were also paid for their participation by their parish and law company.  As a sessional at the local university, I was paid per course; any community service I decided to take on was ‘on my own dime’—that is, on a purely volunteer, unpaid, basis.

At one point, the committee arranged for the ethics officer of another hospital to come give a talk.  He was paid to do so.  He didn’t say anything I couldn’t say (and indeed hadn’t already said in one form or another).

After five years, a new hospital was built with lots of bells and whistles; I thought it a good time to propose that I be hired as an on-site part-time ethics officer.  No.  Just—no.

Women are expected to help, to assist; what they do is done as a favour.  No one expects to pay them; it’s why we ourselves don’t expect to be paid.

Men, on the other hand, expect to be paid.  And they are.  They are the ones we help; they are the ones we assist.  They do.  We just help.

But take away any man’s help, any man’s assistants, and let’s see how much he achieves,  how many programs he develops, implements; how many books he writes; how many companies he creates and runs.

Oct 22

reading Our Father, by Marilyn French

“I wanted to command attention the way he did, learned how to do it too, Clare said I had it down, but not the same, they don’t listen to me the same way, it’s different.  They liked listening, looking up to him, elder statesman.  They don’t like listening to me.”  p22

“Oh, why didn’t I go?  Nobody asked me.” p110

Because we’ve been taught from the beginning that we must not ask, we must wait.  Wait for a man to ask us to the prom, to ask us out for a drink, dinner, a date, marriage.  Along with the convention that those events are supposedly of utmost importance in a woman’s life, it’s no wonder we grow up waiting to be asked for — everything.  Jobs, membership on task forces and projects, raises, promotions, clients … all the things that put us on the ladder, and help us ascend, to status and income.

Imagine a world in which boys were reprimanded for asking, we taught they must wait—  Well, full stop there. 

And imagine, of course, that women seldom ask them for anything of importance because, well, men just aren’t that important, except as escorts in one way or another …

And it’s not just that.  The few of us who do ask are told ‘no’ (if our asking is indeed acknowledged, ‘heard’…).  (And note, we don’t respond to rejection with a shooting spree.) 

So often, we eventually stop.

“Is that all I am to him, a shudder in the loins?  Is that all fatherhood is?” p216

“Poor kid, what must that feel like, your own father doesn’t even have the interest to lay eyes on you.”  p216

“All I want is some answers. … I don’t care about the money.” p222

…

“You’re asking for something he doesn’t want to give.” p223

No, more likely, something he doesn’t have.  I dare say we impute too much self-awareness to men on issues like this.

“He was so powerful things just appeared before him when he wanted them.” p227

Right.  Men don’t even have to ask.  And women don’t ask.  Partly because they’ve been taught all their lives not to; we’re supposed to just wait … See above.  And partly because when we do ask, we don’t get what we’re asking for anyway.  See This is what happens, Chris Wind.

“… that you and generations of men before you felt that incest was their prerogative, their right—that fathers own the bodies of their daughters as they do those of their wives and slaves.  And that they believe they have the right to own other human beings, to control them, that indeed, they define manhood as the ability to control others.” p296 (my emphasis)

“… you [the father who raped her when she was a child, telling her the whole time that he loved her…] destroyed utterly my ability to discriminate love from power, sex from submission.  You ruined my emotional life.  Forever.”  p300

Does that explain the possibly increasing preference for ‘rough’ sex?

“This left me with a sense of helplessness and inferiority—a sense that I have no existence, don’t matter—that I will have to battle as long as I live.”  p302

Don’t need to rape your daughters to do that.  Just ignore and belittle them from the moment they’re born until they finally get the fuck out of your house.

“Even though I never harmed you—after all, I have no responsibility for my own existence, my ow birth—and never wished you ill, you have condemned me to eternal shadowhood and pain.”  p303

Indeed.  Men, why do you create something in order to ignore it, abandon it, to hurt it so?  Because perverse ‘masculinity’ requires it.  And you buy it.  Masculinity.

“I don’t have to have another husband.  The thought shocked her into utter stillness.”  p318

Pity more women don’t realize that at eighteen.  In our current society, we don’t need to marry a man.  End of story.  Take advantage of that! 

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