Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: misogyny

  • racism vs sexism: dinosaurs attack

    It fascinates me how people invariably preface racist statements with the words, “I’m not a racist or anything, but: [other people are inferior or flawed].”

    As they say, you have to ignore everything that comes before the “but.”

    The thorough-going unseen privilege of those who feel most entitled to thus pronounce on other people’s worth goes so deep, it seems the accusation of racism is itself the worst taboo. So I can say whatever I like about other people’s inferiority, but for you to call me racist is the one insult that’s unable to be borne. One can bring – I have brought – entire gatherings to a grinding halt by saying, “But, So-and-So, that’s racist.” Everybody shuts up and heads swivel slowly, almost audibly, like locals greeting strangers in a bar. No matter what vile assertions I make about other people’s humanity, eerily they can never be as baselessly awful as the assertion that someone else’s ideas are racist. This to me is the most irrefutable evidence that white people live in a miasma of clouding white fragility and privilege. I have heard plenty of racist shit from all kinds of people’s mouths. But I’ve never, ever, once heard anybody say: “I am a racist. And because I’m racist, I believe [other people are inferior or flawed].”

    I even had one former sister-out-law explain to me, with great kindness as I was new in her family, after a revolting discussion of a family friend who had just dropped off a condolence card and who happened to be Aboriginal (“well, if they were all like that… it wouldn’t be a problem”) “Cathoel you don’t get it. He hates his own race as much as I hate his race.”

    I said, “But, Veronica – that’s racist.” Shocked gasps all round. She drew a quivering hand to her breastbone. Her voice broke. “Are you calling me A Racist?”

    I said, “I think you just called yourself a racist. You hate his race. That’s what racism is. It’s not complicated.” But the outrage that broke following that statement did not still over the next three or four days. We drove home at the end of the visit still carrying it and I never felt comfortable in that family again. Because mine was the real insult.

    It also fascinates me that people who feel entitled to preface “this or that racist assumption” with the words “I’m not racist but” will invariably feel compelled to also say, if female, “I’m not a feminist or anything, but [ya know, I just sorta have this feeling maybe women are people too?”] As a society we have learned to feel ashamed of our racism but not yet to uproot and rout it. As a society we have not yet learned to feel ashamed of our hatred of women. There were those few halcyon years in which people started to say, “…I mean, chairperson.” Then the demeaning backlash of “political correctness” descended like a storm on all our heads. Now the labour to have one’s struggle for equality, one’s longing to be recognised as fully human and valid, can be all wiped away with this one sneering, coward’s phrase. “Not to get all politically correct on you or anything, but…. [I believe and know everyone is human. Yup, each of us. No exceptions. That’s just how it is.”]

  • the lascivicious wink

    So it’s late afternoon and the storm has passed, the light has begun to pearl. I’ve ducked into the local store to buy tomatoes and am issuing barefoot out of their sliding doors and down their concrete steps under the low, spreading tree. There is a man standing across the road behind me but I don’t see him because my face is lifted to the changing sky, feeling the colours dissolve down like layers of espresso and frothed milk blending slidingly together down the inside of a glass. It’s been such a hard week, it’s such a beautiful day. At first the crowing, acquisitive wolf whistle that issues from the man standing behind me (or lounging) does not attract my attention because it’s not about me, it’s about something else, my mind is flowing like a river of milk clunking with thoughts and I am active, relaxed, upright, happy, and at peace.

    The whistle comes again, this time with an insistent edge. I feel myself stiffen. My walk loses its swing, a little. I am self-conscious. The street apart from me and, I now realize, him, is empty and there is no traffic. I can hear the traffic sliding round the other side of the hill but too noisy and too far away to hear a person who needed help, if anyone did need help. His second whistle getting no appreciable response he calls out, “Oi!” because it’s not acceptable to him that I might direct my own attention and be mistress of my own thoughts, that my world is mine and not his to command, that I am not interested in seeing his face or his leer or his gesture that I could otherwise add to my repertoire – my quiver – of lascivious and demeaning gestures. His inability to accept, after two failed attempts, that a passing stranger has no interest in his sexual assessment of her all of a sudden gels in my mind and I realize what the worst thing is. It’s not the veiled possibility of attack, though sometimes a woman finds that is worse than anything the rest of us imagine. It’s not the shattering of the bold, beautiful, skyblown and well-earned day and these few moments in between working at my desk and cooking dinner when I can think about whatever I please.

    It’s that moments ago I had escaped the ever-mirrored hall of minor torment that is girls’ guide to the universe. I’d slipped the leash. From birth I’ve been, like almost every girl, taught that my expression and the way I stand and how I sit – with knees together! at all times! yet mocked for pigeon toes – are subject to the constant and perpetual raillery of everyone outside me: they have authority over my appearance, it is not mine, it’s theirs, for them, to please. And somehow slipping out of the house preoccupied with my thoughts and not stopping to change my worn old tank top and stretched-out skirt, somehow browsing over the bags of round tomatoes and lifting them to catch the scent and emerging into the late afternoon with that soft red weight hanging in my hand I had momentarily forgotten, I had reached the open sea, I was making for the islands and I’d lost my sense of the lifelong liability of my gender.

    They say some cultures – not ours, oh, of course not – have household-sized kings, many little Mussolinis. Drug kingpins and pimps are local emperors. Each man is entitled, if this be what he chose, to run the harem of his immediate neighbourhood. This man, to use the term (yet again) very loosely, is afraid of my independence and feels he has to broach it. What spurs him is not my luscious, unconscious walk nor my legs nor the way some sun or streetlight caught my hair nor how my skirt swings. It is that I sashayed past in my womanhood and failed to notice him, to put down my tomatoes and acknowledge his mandom. The little kingdom of him.

    Once I’d not heard him, or ignored him, I had to be brought to heel. He needed to emphasise and impose his own right to impose a faint sexual threat, by which a man says to a stranger: You, girl. It’s you I choose. I’d like to do this and this to you and it’s immaterial to me how you consent to the idea of it, how you consent to it. As the distance between us sags and increases what’s bothering me is the thought policing. His outrage that I didn’t respond. His insistence on his right to control. He wanted to intrude himself onto my thoughts: a physically masculine impulse. And what injures me, only slightly and for the thousandth time, is the occupation of this sweet space I’m living in, which is full to the brim already with adventure, not all of it easy and fresh and rewarding, not all of it kind. It’s this intrusion by the flimsy failing fascism of some random stranger who strokes me with his stalk eyes as I go: but who will never, however powerful the zoom on his X-ray specs, ever really see me.

    I turn the corner and arrogance, or rather privacy, reasserts itself and I start to notice the cupped corns held out by a neighbour’s mown bushes. I notice the soft crisping carpet of green leaves and blossom that has been cast down by the storm. I think: nor will he ever, surely, truly see himself. Nor see the sky for what it is. Nor feel the breeze landing cleanly on the naked parts of his skin. Nor feel the pale green of these undersides. The rustle of fresh joy in the trees and underfoot that announced the storm has now passed and all of us here have, as they say in German, overlived it.

  • I’ve been beautiful since I was nine years old

    Being shoved up against the train windows by a much older man whose friends looked on and hooted. Waking up as the blankets were stripped off my upper bunk and the passport controller’s flashlight swept up and down my body. Having to leap from a moving car on a back road after accepting a lift with a girlfriend from two seemingly friendly, laid-back university students we had been chatting with for some time. Having a man grab and wrench my breast as I passed. Innumerable insultingly degrading sexual suggestions, often from immaculate men in suits. Erections pressed up against me by hairdressers, fellow commuters, shoppers. Being lifted out of the way every time the manager at the place I waitressed needed to pass. I was fifteen. Being called sunshine, baby, darlin, hot lips, sweet mamma, etc etc. Being called “that.” Being spoken of and numerically rated by men who address their friends rather than me. Having various uncles slide their hands up my leg and one of them tell me, “You are so beautiful I can see how uncles might have Funny Feelings about their nieces.” Being told this year by a male gynaecologist he finds me “too erotic.” Facedown in underwear after a massage feeling an elderly, frail physiotherapist recommended by a trusted (male) friend plant a kiss on my outer butt cheek and then crow to himself, “I’m allowed to do that, because I’m your Uncle So and So.”

    Being grabbed between the legs from behind as I walked off a dance floor, by a man I’d not even had eye contact with. Being followed. Being crowded in doorways. Being told “Ohhh, I love your eyes,” by a man staring at my breasts. Being asked a thousand times, in injured tones, “Hey, where you going?” Being wolf-whistled, cat-called, followed in slow cars. Having my drink spiked at a nightclub, fighting off the swarming feeling of faintness, and later hearing from a friend that she had woken up in the alleyway behind the club. Being attacked whenever I speak up against misogyny and called frigid, ugly, a bitch, a lesbian bitch, accused of man-hating. I had a fork shoved into my butt as I leaned across a broad table of well-dressed executive couples by a man who said when I turned, “Are you done?” Waitressing felt so hazardous. A sweet, shy, tiny elderly man tunnelled his head under my arms to nuzzle my breasts, in front of all his family, as I was leaning across the table with my hands filled with platters of hot food. I looked down and he was smiling up at me with a blissful expression of entitled boyish naughtiness.

    I am a shy but fairly outspoken person and am protected, to some extent, by my strong and athletic tallness. I’m taller than most men. Talking to other women shows these experiences not to be very unusual. It’s endemic. For many of us it spreads across our entire life from the age of eleven or twelve. I’ve tried a range of responses. Ignore him. Pour his beer over his head. Report him to a bouncer. Yell at him. Most times men seemed gleeful to have gotten a response; sometimes the lack of a response seems to invite further harassment.

    If you are a man, picture to yourself how intimidating any one of these experiences might feel. Now picture a barrage of them, week in week out, regardless of what you wear or of how you conduct yourself. The only way you can escape this treatment is by sticking close to another man, who owned you first. There’s nowhere safe.

  • how embarrassment

    Tony Abbott threatening to “shirt-front” Putin? And that meme that has the two of them side by side, Tony shirtless in his budgie smugglers and Putin shirtless on his horse? It arose the same day he made his remark and it says, “….wait.”

    I just explained all this to my immigrant boyfriend, a Berliner who has gleefully been singing out “Team Australia!” whenever he sees someone do something stupid. I acted out the shirt-fronting to show him what it was. Then I had to let him go because I was weeping with laughter. The aggression and arrogance of the gesture made it ridiculous. I am still laughing and he is shaking his head, muttering to himself in German. “Furchtbar ist es. Peinlich ist es. Unglaublich.”

    My stomach aches. My heart too, a little. “It’s so awful. It’s embarrassing. Unbelievable.”

  • crimes against children and our rage

    A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense of moral entitlement sicken me. “He” had “that” done to him, as a child, almost certainly, or has been damaged in some way. Where is the difference between him taking it out on another child and us punitively taking it out on him? What is the difference between what he put that woman through and what we are now so virtuously decreeing he should suffer? It feels Old Testament, feels primitive. I discuss this queasy feeling with my local German, who instantly gets it. He says: in Germany on Facebook there are many Nazi pages, real Nazis, always hiding behind this same rubric of “death penalty to child molesters.” It’s under the flag of “save our children,” he says. I’m uneasily reminded of anti-abortion extremists who believe that “baby murdering” doctors are so evil they can righteously be shot in cold blood. Nobody deserves rape. Nobody, not even a rapist. They deserve a heavier sentence than a smuggler. They deserve to be stopped and prevented and given at least the opportunity for rehabilitation. Some are unrepentant and can’t heal, true sociopaths who need locking away, for the safety of the community. But who are we as a people to gang up and declare that we are pure and they must suffer. 90% of our most commonly available porn according to an article I posted this week involves violence against “the talent” – usually women. Foulness and entitlement and a spoilt, rotten, egotistical, moralising snatching of what suits us best, no matter what, pervade our culture and are draining the teeming seas, lopping whole forests and beheading mountains, rupturing the very liveability of the Earth. You can’t fight fire with fire or fear with fear. The fantasy that all the evil can be projected cleanly onto one monstrous, identifiable stranger who is then locked away is a dangerous and to me deeply repugnant fallacy.

     

  • Game of Drones

    Game of Drones

    Just watched the opening episodes of Game of Thrones. Until recently I imagined it was a video game: a world all but invisible to me. Turns out it’s a television series.

    Melodrama. It’s a kingdom of sighs, and costume. I’ve never seen such a celebration of unthinking brutality. Well, not since A Clockwork Orange. It doesn’t just document, it glories: beheadings, rapes, all filmed in lingering detail. A small boy is pushed out of a window off-handedly. The script is littered with casual misogyny. A man wakes up among his dogs and his enemy sneers, “Better-looking than the bitches you’re usually with.” “Soon enough that child will spread her legs and start breeding.” “Thank the gods for Bessie, and her tits.”

    The kingdom is populated entirely by supermodels. There’s a lot of modern slang and the bad characters and good characters have neon signs above their heads. The good have an edge of self-pitying martyrdom, the bad have sensation instead of feeling. If there ever is a dystopian future in which this kind of glamorized yet boring reconstruction of some imagined medieval past holds sway, people like me will either be queens or court jesters or we won’t last very long.

    H2O HoL mahjong tiles

  • a jeans under it

    a jeans under it

    An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.

    Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.

    Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.

    They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.

    But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.

    H2O HoL opshop manekin