Fuck You, Men's Rights Activists
Fuck you for pretending your primary goal as a “movement” is anything other than control of women’s lives and bodies. Fuck you for being so delusional about how women behave in the real world, you fell for a parody of your worst nightmare—and lined up to support a guy who told you he’d punched his girlfriend. Fuck you for arguing, presumably straight-faced, that facing consequences for hitting your child is basically the same as being a Jewish person in Nazi Germany.
"True gender equality is actually perceived as inequality. A group that is made up of 50% women is perceived as being mostly women. A situation that is perfectly equal between men and women is perceived as being biased in favor of women.
And if you don’t believe me, you’ve never been a married woman who kept her family name. I have had students hold that up as proof of my “sexism.”
My own brother told me that he could never marry a woman who kept her name because “everyone would know who ruled that relationship.” Perfect equality – my husband keeps his name and I keep mine – is held as a statement of superiority on my part."
-
Lucy, When Worlds Collide: Fandom and Male Privilege. (via seaofbadstories)
Also the study where they had women and men talking in a discussion and when women spoke around 30% of the time, men perceived them as dominating the discussion. They didn’t consider it “equal” until something like 5-10% of women talking. (via dumbthingswhitepplsay)
(via memejacker)
"
[Some Indian and “Western” commentators] have reduced India’s rape crisis to a cultural problem. Men, we are told – specifically, Indian men – are culturally lacking and barbaric. They have no concept of women’s rights or equality. They are born and bred to sexually assault and degrade women. This is a familiar phenomenon, and an outgrowth of colonialism. When horrible crimes happen, specifically to women, we reduce the culture, in this case, of about 1 billion people, to a gang-bang-enabling society of rapists. And of course, by blaming Indian culture specifically, Western sexism is brushed under the table. We arrive at Gayatri Spivak’s formula explaining the colonial exploitation of anti-woman violence in colonized societies: “white men saving brown women from brown men”.
The process of reducing brown men to savages has been all too familiar in recent years. We have seen Egyptian men reduced to “animals” and “beasts” by the New York Post because a mob high on a combination of stupidity and jubilation about Mubarak’s downfall brutally assaulted white reporter Lara Logan. We have seen a number of “native informants,” from Mona Eltahawaly to Hirsi Ali, tell us that Arab and Muslim men “hate” women. In typical colonial fashion, gender dynamics, including real crimes and acts of brutality, are reduced to “cultural” problems in which we can reduce entire societies to large gang-bang parties predicated on savage men who simply prey on women.
"- Amith Gupta - Orientalist Feminism Rears its Head in India via Jadaliyya (via mehreenkasana)
(via rigidfingers)
Marxist Economics
A Microeconomic Reconstruction of Marx’s Labour Market Theory
Marx, the Declining Rate of Profit, and British Political Economy
Marx on the English Agricultural Revolution: Theory and Evidence
Marx’s Falling Rate of Profit: A Dialectical View
On Marx’s Theory of Unemployment
Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement
Rates of Profit and Interregional Flows of Capital
The Rationality of Empowerment: Microcredit, Accumulation by Dispossession, and the Gendered Economy
Re-Structuring in U.S. Manufacturing: The Decline of Monopoly Capital
Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa
Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
Replaced the old links and added a couple pdfs I thought were relevant.
You are the absolute best!!!
- Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
- Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
- Aurora Levins Morales’s Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood
- bell hooks’ Cultural Criticism & Transformation
- Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses
- Combahee River Collective Statement
- Dorothy Allison’s A Question of Class
- Judith Butler documentary
- Leslie Feinberg’s We Are All Works in Progress
- Paula Gunn Allen’s Who is Your Mother?: Red Roots of White Feminism
- R.W. Connell’s The Social Organization of Masculinity
- Sandra Lee Bartky’s Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
- Sandra Cisneros’s Guadalupe the Sex Goddess
- Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman?
- Susan Bordo’s The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity
(via walterbasedjamin)
"Teaching women how to defend themselves against male rapists is not the same as working to change society so that men will not rape. Establishing houses for battered women does not change the psyches of the men who batter them, nor does it change the culture that promotes and condones their brutality. Attacking heterosexuality does little to strengthen the self-concept of the masses of women who desire to be with men. Denouncing housework as menial labor does not restore to the woman houseworker the pride and dignity in her labor she is stripped of by patriarchal devaluation. Demanding an end to institutionalized sexism does not ensure an end to sexist oppression"
- bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism, p.191
You’re a Pussy if You Think There’s a War on Men
For some men, women—especially feminists—are terrifying. Not in the normal oh-my-God-I-can’t-ask-her-out-what-if-she-says-no way that middle schoolers and characters on Friends experience, but “afraid” in the sense that women will take their money, try to get pregnant on purpose, invent false rape claims, and use feminism to generally abuse men. In this narrative, men are either an oppressed minority (or about to become one), or have to “fight back” against feminists to preserve their rights.
If you want to see what this kind of thinking looks like, take a dip into the river of the Men’s Rights section of Reddit, where a bunch of dudes go to complain about getting raped by women and talk gibberish about how their “clans” are getting attacked by “Statism and Feminism.” Currently, some of the most popular posts on the subreddit include a complaint about how if you owe more than $2,500 in child support payments you can’t get a passport (in the Men’s Rights universe, deadbeat dads are often victims of a misandrist court system); adiscussion, inspired by a Walking Dead plot point, about how getting beaten up is worse than being threatened with rape; an account of some guy squabbling with an obscure feminist blogger (these guys are always getting into internet beef with feminist bloggers, and vice-versa); and a screenshot of some gobbledygook about patriarchy that probably sounded smart to the high-schooler who wrote it. Like a lot of Reddit, the Men’s Rights forum is a way for predominantly white, predominantly rich young men to pat themselves on the back for how smart they are. It gives them something to do, I guess, and it gives the Shit Reddit Says subreddit something to react against.
But the idea that feminism is harmful to men, and women have declared war on people with penises, isn’t confined to Reddit’s nether regions anymore. It’s now mainstream enough for Fox News’s website, which published an awful, troll-baiting op-ed about “The War on Men” written by Suzzanne Venker. Her thesis is that while women want to marry men, men don’t want to marry them because, “Women aren’t women anymore.” She goes on:
“Women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.
Now the men have nowhere to go.”
What she’s describing is a pretty standard anti-feminist narrative: The evil feminists “convinced” women to want things like the same careers and pay and power that men had (they didn’t really want these things, see, but they were persuaded otherwise), thereby causing them to lose the status they were too short-sighted to have valued.
I made a video!
A video that addresses the political ramifications of the shift in production of videogames for oppositional groups known as ‘Counterpublics’. What do these groups, and their contestation of who gets to be the controllers of symbolic production mean for society today?
Daniel rules, peep game.
"I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both."
- Angela Davis (via ceedling)
(via youeatdogfood)
