Silencing is

Silencing is

when one cannot speak, because the consequences of doing so are so dire. When one’s mental, physical or emotional health is at risk from the cruel reactions of others.

using sexualised language to humiliate feminists who are critiquing your pleasures, or disingenuously aligning them with the right wing for the same reason.

spreading taunts, hatred and abuse at those who would speak against you, or those whom you perceive to be speaking against you.

approving these tactics, compliance with them, cowardice.

drowning out the speech of others with your self-importance, mockery and jeering at dissenters, misrepresenting their views.

assuming the ultimate priority of one’s own speech.

 

Silencing is not

when someone refuses to publish your comments on their blog, in their own personal space.

the same as having one’s actions critiqued by feminists. the critique itself presents no barrier to your continuing to act.

being asked to take responsibility for one’s own words.

Edited at stupid o’clock: post now with correct grammar… I hope :p

An Observation

I have seen male ’sex positive’ (’scuze me while I snigger) reactionaries, um, ‘liberals’ referring to radical feminists as ‘fascists’. Now I’m not an expert on twentieth century history, but I’m pretty sure our views have sod-all to do with the murderous followers of Mussolini. We do, as evident from my first line-snarkiness, refer to johns and pornsick men as ‘reactionaries’, because they support the subordination of women and the idea of sexual relations as inheritantly shameful. We also refer to them as ‘johns’ because whether they are personally users of prostituted women or not, they support such men. But we have never refered to them as ‘fascists’ for the simplest of reasons: it does not make sense, and it is juvenile.

The use of such language against us shows such hatred, and moreover, fear. It is coming from the johns, and it is nothing but cowardice. Such language used against women is meant to keep us quiet. They know they have no right to say what they are saying. Don’t expect them to listen to feminist thought; they will shout us down at every opportunity, while claiming the friendship of those of whom they approve. Watch how they shout down women on their blogs who do not fit their image of sexy, agreeable, polite. Pro-feminists, if they are to be worthy of the name, have to listen to things they may find upsetting. They must accept criticism from feminists, listen to all women’s truths, no matter how inconvienient for their desires and masculinities.

Johns parading as pro-feminists! So what else is new?

Edit 27/02/08: We are also referred to as ‘wingnuts’, another rather transparent and disingenuous attempt to contect us to the right wing. Oh my dear pornified gentlemen, saying so doesn’t make it so. And we will continue to expose everything that you are. You may hide your sneer behind a smile- but we will see it.

This post is in no way intended to suggest that the author never is, nor has been, juvenile in her anger. Of couse she has. Duh.

I am not objective

Objectivity assumes there is a single ultimate truth out there for the finding, which will be discovered through ‘rational’ discussion. Feminists are often derided for being ’subjective’; women are called irrational (or emotional); men are the class in charge of language, science, politics and philosophy in our society. Coincidence? I think not.

The ideal of objectivity and rationality is the absence of ‘bias’ or of emotion towards the topic being considered. Science, for example, has claimed objectivity and rationality since the eighteenth century; this objectivity has brought us theories of  women as creatures controlled by their reproductive systems and white males as ’superior’ to all other human beings (I’m talking to you, Gynaecology and Anthropology). The Western males who considered women as attachments to wombs and happily maintained that the white Christian male represented the peak of the evolutionary chain, appealed to their use of rational argument and their lack of political bias. Today, instead, we have women as ruled by hormones or a differently wired-up brain, and refer the countries which are poor due to the greed of the imperial West, as ‘developing’- with the unsaid assumption that we are ‘developed’.

The problem with objectivity and rationality is that it ignores who decides what is evident, and what is obvious. The dominant class is the one that is able to enforce its perceptions of what is ‘obvious’ and rational; these perceptions, needless to say, benefit its ideology and the maintance of its power. It is apparently undebatable, for example, that women’s brains are different to men’s, because various scientific experiments have proven this. To argue against this, as a laywoman, is to invite the accusation that you do not understand what you are talking about, and are therefore unqualified to judge. Appeals to the absurdity of accepting conclusions about the ‘natural’ difference between men and women as valid in a world where women and men are treated differently from the moment they are born, are refuted, because science is ‘objective’. We obey ‘doctor’s orders’ because the doctor supposedly knows us better than we know ourselves; in the mental health service, this leads to the imposition of heavy sedatives on ‘psychotic’ patients and the use of electroshock, despite the devastating side effects of both treatments, because the doctor knows what is best for the patient. That the doctor’s ideas about what is best for the patient may be due to his/her assumptions about how the patient should be behaving in a framework which benefits the status quo, or to do with her/his discomfort at the sight of a person acting ‘abnormally’, is routinely ignored.

Objectivity disregards such trivialities as human feelings because it does not regard them as real. Whatever it cannot take into its hands, touch, control and order it does not consider real. That is why a commentator (male) felt it was appropriate to ask the inane question ‘what is pain?’ on a comments thread for a post about sexual abuse of women. Pain was unreal to him, because it did not affect him.* Many readers of my blog can tell him what pain is. Here, a member of the dominant class refused to recognise that which he could not himself control, brought to us by his objective, rational thought process. Objectivity denies the viewpoints of those who do not agree with the dominant ideology of what is ‘rational’, ‘obvious’, ’self-evident’, and assumes that the thinker is capable of divorcing himself from the world in which he lives, in order to make judgements which affect the lives of the less powerful.

It is incredible the number of comments I have seen from (mostly) men on feminist threads, proclaiming that the truth is self-evident and that they (of course!) are the ones who are able to point it out. The silly feminist women ignore the known facts that men are different from women, that men ‘need’ sex, that women want degradation and humiliation. They never consider that they are wrong. They make these statements without evidence, and insist that we accept them as true. But we’re not going to do that.

After all, we are not objective.

*I deleted this chap’s comment, needless to say.  

Allowing all comments is not a virtue: to my detractors

Dear detractors who try to comment on my site before being evilly censored by my mighty powers, 

I am sick, like many other radfem bloggers, no doubt, of being told I’m ‘censoring’ someone when I refuse to publish their inane/ insulting/ pointless comments on my blog. I have discussed the true meaning of censorship here, and defined it as an action of the powerful against the powerless, rather than as not being allowed to vomit nonsense in a radfem safeplace.

But I’d like to add a bit more to this: It is not a virtue to allow abusive commentators on one’s blog. You heard me. Allowing those who insult, deride, revile and abuse space on one’s blog without explicitly condemning their actions is tantamount to condoning them. Not everyone deserves to ‘have their say’, because the abusive MRAs who comment on feminist blogs and are ‘censored’, always have their say. It is their victims who don’t. Not every viewpoint is worth publishing.

You do not have the right to impose yourself in my space, even if you truly believe you are standing up to the Big Feminist Meanie by countering with a point she has heard and dismissed many, many times. You can’t come here with a oneliner which takes no account of what I have carefully written and argued, expressing your sentiment as though it were true, and expect me to coddle you. I am not Speaker’s Corner.

If you come here to assert your rights to women’s bodies, you will not be published. I don’t care about your speech- it is not more important than the rights of women to freedom and bodily integrity. If your speech silences that of others who deserve and need to speak more, you’ll have to take it elsewhere, to other places in which allowing abusers space is deemed to be a sign of the blogger’s great integrity- and that’s not here. If I allow abusive, snide, cruel speech on my site, it creates an atmosphere in which it is harder for those with less power, for survivors of abuse, to speak, just as pornography contributes to an atmosphere of misogyny in which violence towards women is normalised and tolerated.

I can’t stop you from speaking nonsense- no-one can. I also can’t stop you from being cruel and misogynistic. But I can stop you from exploiting me and my readers, and I shall. If you’re trying to post nasty comments on my site, you’re wasting my time, and my time is precious- clearly much more so than yours. Demanding space on my blog means you are asserting that my time is yours, and my space is yours. Neither are yours.

Not much love

Laurelin Rain

On Empowerment

This is a term we hear a lot, whether in jest, mockery or sincerity, always in terms of its applicability to certain acts for women. We do not hear that certain acts empower men, for example, because men are presumed not to require empowerment. In a general sense this is true; men have social, sexual and economic control of women as a class, and thus as a class they are not in need of this extra boost. (Obviously not all individual men are ‘empowered’ to the same extent, in the same way women are not all individually equally ‘disempowered’; this observation is not to deny the differences).

Empowerment = the gaining of power. A powerful human being can effect change in the world, can know that their actions will have some consequence that they intended, can determine the path of their own life, cannot be forced to do what they do not wish, cannot be condemned to have to act according to the dictates of another. The use of the word ‘empowerment’ in the senses in which we often hear it — Act X is empowering to women — seems to suggest the production of some inner power or strength. That to undertake Act X is to discover this power- with the underlying threat that if one does Act X and does not become ‘empowered’, that therefore one is not doing Act X properly/ is incapable of becoming an (em)powerful woman. To name an act as necessarily empowering is to mock or condemn those who do not wish to undertake the act, or those who having undertaken the act, did not enjoy it.  We are used to hearing the phrase ‘empowering’ in regard to sexualised acts that many women are otherwise suspicious of and thus do not wish to undertake. The message here is frequently that to consider oneself as being sexually attractive is to be ‘empowered’, and that sexual attractiveness takes the form of display before others.

I have remarked before that the power to please is no power at all. ‘Empowering’ acts are offered to those who have least power in the world, in lieu of the power that the dominant class already possesses. ‘Empowering’ acts are offered to enable women to fit themselves into the world created for them, this world in which one’s biological sex is deemed to describe the whole of one’s life, in which biological sex is deemed to somehow magically affect one’s mind (in the nineteenth century, women were intellectually stunted by their reproductive capacity; today ‘hormones’ are the culprits blamed for supposed sex differences).

Nothing is intrinsically ‘empowering’, and ‘empowerment’ is a poor substitute for the ability to control one’s life, without the threat of rape or other sexual violence, to have enough to live on, to not have to compromise in order to live. Power will not come from a set of dance moves, or the approval of others.

It is that inner determination that things can be different, that the world can be different, the refusal to accept a hierarchical social order as ‘natural’ and therefore inevitable, the refusal to believe that just because the world is described and presented one way that it is the only way it is or can be. This is where power begins. It may not be much, and it may be less than others have, but it is where we start.

Befehl ist Befehl

We have heard of court cases in which a rape survivor, who has been beaten up by her assailant, nevertheless does not receive justice because her rapist claims that she ‘consented’ to the violence, because she ‘liked rough sex’, or whatever. Aside from the ludicrousness of the assumption that she would have wanted to be brutalised, why is it implicitly accepted that if person A consents to a certain act, that person B is therefore not guilty of having committed it? The fact that rapists have been able to use this defence in court shows that i) juries and judges believe that women desire violence, and ii) that a person may do without condemnation whatever another may ask them to do.

This would not be accepted in other circumstances. ‘He asked me to shoot him’ would not be taken as a legitimate defence for a murderer, even if the murderer could prove that his victim had, indeed, asked to be shot and killed. Consent does not imply that the performer of the act is morally justified. If someone asks you to beat them up, should you do it? Even if they say they like it, does that mean you bear no responsibility for performing an act of violence upon them? You still did it. You still brutalised a person. You didn’t make the moral decision.

My point in bringing this up is to note that the very logic involved in the ’she liked sexual violence’ defence is fundamentally flawed, as it ignores the fact that the purveyor of violence still bears responsibility for his actions even if his violence was specifically requested. Clearly, it is a trope used by rapists which relies on the supposed masochism of women to keep them out of gaol, and it is a revolting insult to a survivor. But even if the claim were true, I cannot see how consent to violence can be used by the perpetrator as an excuse for the violence.

‘Befehl ist Befehl’ was the famous excuse given by Nazis at their trials after World War Two, and still heard in documentaries about the war today: Orders are orders. The assumption is, if someone else ‘orders’ you to do it, it is not therefore your crime, and you cannot even consider disobeying. This was not accepted at the Nuremburg trials as a defence; its cousin, ’she wanted it’, used in trials conducted in the war on women, should not be accepted either.

‘If someone asked you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?’

If someone asked you to harm them, would you do it? If someone said they would like you to harm them, would you do it? I hope that the answer is no, as I cannot see how the person who obeys their conscience would be able to say anything else.

The power of words: III

 He/ She/ It
Usually written in that order, this way of cataloguing human beings starts from the generic human (‘he’- used to denote males and people of unknown or both genders), to the other (’she’- has been used as a book title to suggest otherness, when used with a certain tone of voice by a male can sound particularly damning), to the nonhuman (‘it’). There is no word in English for ’she or he’, and conventional wisdom insists that one use ‘he’ when speaking of what the generic human being thinks, or is doing. To use ’she’ is to draw attention to otherness, and men are expected to be insulted by being referred to as female. ‘They’ is commonly used as a neutral singular in the place of ‘he’, but the Honoured Grammarians will insist that it is wrong.

And then there’s ‘it’. ‘It’ is an insult when used to describe a human being as it denies the humanity of the person addressed. This is because it is assumed that to be a human being one must be gendered; one must exist in one or the other of two classes of human being, whose behaviour, quality of life, abilities and role become dependant upon their biological sex. The effort which is used to keep the categories of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ seperate is suggestive of the importance of sex classes to patriarchal society, and of just how alike the sexes really are. After all, if men and women were so naturally different, the effort would be unnecessary.

Man/ Mankind
While women are told that complaining about the use of ‘he’, ‘mankind’, ‘man’ and so forth to denote all human experience is pathetic, and shows a lack of understanding of the words, men are permitted to use feminine words as insults among themselves. To question the use of ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ as opposed to the better (but nonetheless problematic) ‘humanity’ or ‘humankind’ frequently results in eyerolling. To belittle another’s complaint about the use of language is to regard their experiences as unworthy of record, as meaningless. Who after all, has decided that masculine words can include women as well? Control of language includes the ability to control the articulation of experience, particularly that of marginalised groups whose lives do not accord with the accepted norm, or who are unhappy with that norm.

In 1984, the creation and development of Newspeak is entirely geared towards abolishing words to describe aspects of human experience that allow people to question the lives they must lead. This is well worth a read, as is Julia Penelope’s fantastic Speaking Freely.

The power of words: II

slut/ whore/ slag/ tart (and the list goes on…)
In a world where a woman’s sexuality and her body is deemed to have a price, any suggestion of a woman ‘giving’ sex without a price (slut) or for the wrong price (whore) is a damning one. With a woman’s body being seen as a commodity with a value that can be apraised materially, a woman who is perceived to be ‘giving away’ that commodity is regarded as degraded. Calling a woman one of these names brings her sexual history under public scrutiny, as though the ways in which she chooses to engage in sexual behaviour have anything to do with her worth as a human being. To use one of these words in describing a woman is to participate in the view of sex as being dirty, of women who have sex as being especially dirty, to engage in the discourse that is seen in pornography, used to destroy women in rape trials, used to silence women who would speak loudly.

bitch/ cow/ dog
These supposedly harmless words are deployed as insults to describe women as being less than human, resting on the ideology of women being closer to animals than men, and of animals being of less worth than human beings. ‘Bitch’ and ‘cow’ in particular call attention to the femaleness of the human being insulted, whereas ‘dog’ is more ambiguous, usually meaning an ‘unattractive’ woman. ‘Bitch’ in particular is used of women who argue with others, and seems to come from the image of female dogs as fighting tooth and nail for the safety of their young- something that we can maybe take some solace in. Being called a bitch suggests that 1) you’ve been speaking your mind and 2) that you are dedicated in your protection of the innocent.

The power of words: I

Words are picked, consciously or not, to have a particular effect upon the reader. There is a weight of meaning behind a word, which is called up in the reader’s mind when s/he comes across it. I have argued before that words are used as weapons, and that to regard them as ‘harmless’ is to ignore the damage they can do, particularly to marginalised people. Likewise, certain ‘heavy’ words and phrases are used to discredit feminist arguments, with the intention that the history and unpleasantness they imply dissuade the reader from hearing what feminists have to say.  Just use the words, regardless of their suitability, and people shudder. I’m hoping that this will be a series (mostly because I don’t have the energy to write about all the words I’m thinking of right now), so here’s the first phrase I will consider, brought to you by, like all the others, the letters B and S.

Brainwashing
Radical feminists are frequently accused of regarding women as ‘brainwashed’. The phrase implies a lack of conciousness, suggesting that one’s mind has been thoroughly cleaned of information, becoming a blank canvas on which the powerful can project their own chosen images. As well as this, ‘brainwashed’ is seen as an insult towards the one with the cleaned brain- that person is stupid and incapable of thinking for themself. Radical feminists have never this said about women.

What radical feminists have said, however, is that women are subject to psychological pressures that men either do not experience, or that they experience to a lesser degree. The messages demanding that women be ‘attractive’ in appearance, that they should cover their faces with artificial colouring because they are not acceptable as they are, that they should teeter on stilts, wear clothing that apologises for their physical ‘flaws’, be polite and caring despite the provocation, are evidently all around us, and it hardly counts as being ‘brainwashed’ to be affected by such messages.

Any suggestion that women might act differently if they lived without such pressures is terrifying to patriarchal thinkers, as it implies that there is a place and time where patriarchy could be absent, could not exist. So it is far easier for those wounded by such a suggestion to accuse radical feminists of regarding women as blank canvases. It won’t occur to them that the very fact radfems bring up the issues of beauty rituals and inner patriarchs proves they don’t regard women as being ‘brainwashed’ – if they thought that way of women, why would they bother discussing it? Brainwashed people are a lost cause.

If W suggests that X regards Y as brainwashed, W is demanding that Y stop listening to X, insinuating that W, and only W, has Y’s interests at heart. W is also suggesting that if Y were to take notice of X, it would be an admission of weakness on Y’s part. And W is seldom asked to prove that what s/he says about X’s intentions is true.

A marriage made in heaven

I have found out from Pippi, via Sparkle*Matrix that that the pro-porn group Feminists Against Censorship now has a blog, and, shockingly, that they link to the porn-apologist site MelonFarmers. At the risk of crushing FAC’s free speech with my awesome power to censor others, I’m going to consider what this means.

Here is the mission statement of the group, as seen on the Feminists Against Censorship homepage, with my sarcy comments:

The media may have given you the impression that feminists support moves to censor sexual media, so you might be surprised to know just how many feminists out there have been actively opposing such censorship since long before there was an Internet. And we still do.

The media may have given you that impression, because it is in the media’s interest to do so. What they will not have told you, and what FAC are never going to tell you, is that the feminist position against porn is a stance firmly against the abuse of women and children that occurs in the making of porn. If there is a market for the abuse, then the abuse will continue. And we hold that the rights of vulnerable human beings to not be exploited and abused are greater than the rights of the viewer to get off on the subordination of women. Oh and while I’m here, saying you’re a feminist doesn’t make it so. There is very little on the website that even refers to women, let alone suggests that FAC is concerned with their lives.

Scare stories about the alleged new dangers of the Internet haven’t changed our minds. We still see the same dangers in censorship that we always have, and the “new” arguments really seem remarkably familiar. The equation is simple: Those who have power get to censor, and those who lack power get silenced. If you find yourself in a position to demand and get censorship, you can be sure you are among those who have the power, and you are acting to oppress others.

And who are the people who are most censored currently? I’ll give you a clue, they’re not the consumers of pornography, who are predominantly male and thus possess significant economic and social power over women. The suffering of women in the making of pornography and in the prostitution industry is so censored that in a discussion of porn, people will look straight through the women in the pictures and in the brothels. Their human rights not to be in such a position of poverty or servitude are never brought up. Instead we hear about the rights of the consumers of porn- who are the privileged.

Yes, supporting freedom of speech means you may have to hear and see expression that you don’t like. But if you cave in to censorship, you will still hear expression you don’t like – from the Powers That Be – and be left without a voice to counter it. Don’t be fooled.

Pornography is not speech. Speech is what I’m doing right now, or what the people in the conversation about pornstitution are doing, or what the guy on the street who shouts about Jesus is doing. Once you have to use the bodies of other people to speak, it is not speech. I’ve said all this before, of course. The people demanding the end of pornography and the end of sexist exploitation are not The Powers That Be. If only we were! Just to make sure, I’m going to censor the abuse of women, right… now!

Nope, it didn’t work.

These pages will tell you more about Feminists Against Censorship and other groups that are fighting for free expression, both on the net and off it, from bookstores to libraries, in Britain and America. Follow the links to essays, announcements, campaigns, history, resources, and others who wish to promote the right to speak freely. And join us.

‘Promoting the right to speak freely’ is great. But from the content of FAC’s website, the names of their various publications and their outcry about the possession of records of abuse being made illegal, it seems that that freedom belongs only to the pornographers.  

FAC’s site strikes me as strange in other ways. Despite the assertion that most feminists are on their side, there are very few names of feminists mentioned, and certainly none of feminists only giving their support to the organisation. Of course, if FAC are justified in their arguments against ‘censorship’, then it really shouldn’t matter; if you have truth on your side, that’s all you need. But the special pleading evident in FAC’s insistence that ‘other feminists’ do support them, combined with their failure to show proof of that support, suggests that they are feeling rather insecure.

Another red flag waving itself rather rudely in my face appears here, where the website states that ‘Feminists Against Censorship is unfunded by any government, church, or industry, unlike our opposition’ and that ‘we don’t have funding’. Who is the opposition? If they refer to the ‘bad’ feminists, then they’re both wrong and stupid- we don’t have squat. And the porn industry is not exactly short of cash, publicity or the means to promote and defend itself.

Who do they think they are fooling? 

Back to the MoronFarmers. One of their latest attempts as journalism has them scoffing at Eaves, the organisation that provides shelter and hope to women on a low income, to victims of rape trafficking and has done extensive research on sexual violence, for protesting Channel Five’s newest ’sitcom’ which is set in a brothel. Eaves objects to the portrayal of prostitution as ‘glamorous’ and ‘risk-free’. For this, the Morons label Eaves as a ‘women’s nutter group’.

Firstly, who would know more about the damage a sitcom about prostitution could do, Eaves or MelonFarmers? I think the answer is pretty clear, and MelonFarmers do not even attempt to argue against Eaves’ views. And secondly, what sort of a website that is interested in preventing censorship would refer to a group that has done amazing work for the most powerless and silenced women as a ‘women’s nutter group’, simply because that group took a stance that website disagreed with?

And FAC, you link to these guys?! Show me your feminism, ’cause I aint seeing it.