The Big Business of Anti-Sex Trafficking

by Jacqueline S. Homan,
author of Without Apology

Combatting the scourge of human trafficking has become the sexy, trendy newest cause for privileged opportunists in need of their newest feel-good activism fix as they seek to profit by wrapping themselves in the cloak of social justice. Of course, those whom are the very core of this cause—the sex trafficking victims (or exited women) themselves—are without real, adequate and appropriate help in terms of income support, medical care, education, job training and job placement to regain control of their destiny to rebuild their lives and live with dignity while trying to do so.

Restoring trafficked women to “normalized” status in society is an important goal, but there is an enormous resistance to that on the part of society, including many “allies” that will not stop their privilege-clinging and power-overing to actually facilitate restoration. Sadly, even most such “allies” look down on adult prostituted women who started out as trafficked under-aged girls.

The very women and girls whom this movement is supposed to be about are exploited for their stories and then discarded and thrown under the bus by most “allies”, including many well-heeled academics who’ve been enriched with chair endowments and many other social prizes and rewards after prostituted/exited women’s stories of tremendous suffering have helped pave the career paths of those who enjoy all the status, prestige and prosperity in the name of “speaking for” downtrodden, marginalized women.

After decades of throwing the poorest, most marginalized women away with misogynistic laws and policies of “benign neglect” tantamount to social Darwinism, everybody suddenly wants to cash in on the big business of helping trafficked women and girls. How odd, considering that it was this very same male supremacist society that threw away poor marginalized women and girls into the prostitute caste in the first place—first by ripping away what meager, inadequate threadbare safety net that did exist for destitute women in the name of “personal responsibility”, and second by continuing to discriminate against women for good-paying blue-collar “men’s jobs” that don’t require an expensive college education, and third by reaffirming male entitlement to women’s bodies as disposable reproductive goods and sex goods.

The Obama administration has unveiled a plan inviting public participation for helping to fight human trafficking, and part of the plan is to open funding for battered women’s shelters whose funding was recently cut by the 2010 Congress. More troubling is that most of these domestic violence shelters refuse to take prostituted women who want to exit but who are also destitute and have nowhere to go. Funding for emergency shelters that turn away trafficked women and under-aged girls is funding that won’t be given to shelters run by anti-trafficking groups that help the trafficked.

Cash-strapped survivor-run and/or secular NGO’s that are geared towards providing real material help to survivors get little to none of the funding from the US Department of Health & Human Services through its Refugee Resettlement Office. Non-profit groups that get the lion’s share of the annual grants from the Office of Refugee Resettlement are nearly all anti-abortion Christian organizations that are huge, deeply entrenched corporations with Catholic Charities and Polaris Project getting the most funds.

This is problematic because faith-based charities refuse to provide abortion care to trafficked women and leave them no choice except to be further physically and psychologically violated by their rapists-johns by forcing them to endure a full term of incapacitating pregnancy and a traumatic, grueling childbirth—thus, continuing the rape and torture. Forcing women to get/remain pregnant against their will when they don’t want to go through it has been the time-honored way that men have oppressed and continue to oppress women, using our vulnerability to pregnancy to keep us from having an equal opportunity to have the same good jobs that are automatically handed to men, denying us full citizenship and equal civil and human rights—which is what fuels the sex trade in the first place because it limits women’s opportunities and rights.

If it’s wrong for women and girls to be sexually exploited, how is it NOT also wrong for them to be reproductively exploited by their “rescuers” for the benefit of Christian adoption agencies and rich, white childless couples who are buying the “right” to further exploit those victims with forced factory-farm reproduction to provide them with babies—free grata?

How does this make them any different than the johns who bought the “right” to first use these girls’ bodies for forced sex to provide him with his precious orgasm?

There is something radically wrong with the system when the non-profit mega corporations (aka “faith-based” charities) that enjoy the backing of well-heeled patriarchal, misogynistic religious powerhouses get all the federal grant money from the US Department of Health & Human Services while cash-strapped secular and survivor-run non-profits started by impoverished exited women who are the real human trafficking experts can’t get funding to help destitute survivors and women who want to exit prostitution but can’t due to nearly insurmountable barriers.

A trafficked teen girl who has no choice becomes that 22 year old drug-addicted woman found in a dumpster with her throat cut from ear to ear because of being thrown away by a bootstrap-happy society that pushed her into the arms of traffickers in the name of “personal responsibility” while refusing to give her real equal opportunities and provide a social floor through which no one can fall.

The Exploitation Continues After Exiting

Now not all men are bad, and neither are all Christians. But the fact remains that the majority are comfortable with the status quo because it privileges them at women’s expense, or else there would NOT be a right-wing War on Women where it is women (especially POOR women) who punished with gratuitous cruelty for men’s sense of entitlement, greed, and debauchery. And there would not be a pandemic of sex trafficking fueled by male demand secured by female poverty and disenfranchisement due to discrimination backed by 6,000 years of institutionalized patriarchy.

People with privilege really don’t want to upset the status quo—it may mean having to relinquish some of their own privileges that come at the expense of the disprivileged. Even within the abolition movement, there is a LOT of privilege-clinging and power-overing.

Exploiting women as sex goods and as reproductive chattel are inseparable. It’s the same end game: objectification, reproductive enslavement, sexual terrorism and cruelty towards women to support male supremacy and male privilege to benefit men at women’s expense, suffering and misery.

Forced pregnancy/childbirth was the main linchpin that upheld the plantation slavery system in the antebellum South. African slave women were forced to breed. All for men’s sexual AND economic benefit at women’s expense and suffering. And even though not all men are porn-consuming, prostitute-abusing pigs, the fact remains that ALL men benefit from this sadistic, exploitative hierarchical system of unearned privileges in which women are kept economically, sexually, and socially oppressed in the ‘one-down’ position. And poor white women (“poor white trash”) have also been convenient throw-aways into the sex class so that men could have a free license to be sexually sadistic predators.

It’s no secret that most who are thrown away into the sex caste are those who either lack class privilege or race privilege or both. Poor men get offered helping hand up and job opportunities that are denied to women; poor women get told to take our clothes off—that being “only a whore” is the ONLY place in society for us, the only “option” if we don’t want to starve or be homeless. Or end up disabled or dead for lack of health care from jobless poverty due to discrimination. This is also how you get so many rescued trafficked women who, out of utter despair, reluctantly return to the traffickers and johns.

Traffickers tell their victims that there is no other place for them, that society won’t accept them and treat them nicely. Unfortunately, the lack of support, help, social acceptance, and a leg up for poor, marginalized exited women faced with no alternative except to return to prostitution gives this credence: Everybody (including many “allies” and “rescuers”) in society proves the traffickers right.

Almost all of the faith-based organizations that get the lion’s share of federal grant money only help a select few kids that make good photo opportunities for their charity’s fundraising PR. What kind of message does this send to trafficked teens and adult women who desperately want to exit prostitution that they were trafficked into before reaching that magical age of 18?

Meanwhile, poor adult women who either have already exited (or who want to exit but feel trapped because they’re physically and/or financially unable to exit) never get anything because there’s this idea that grown women cannot suffer and therefore don’t matter. Adult women are just discarded and written off as having made their “choice.” Almost all anti-trafficking groups focus only on children and ignore the women.

The Cost to Society of Ignoring Poor Prostituted Adult Women

Conservative estimates based on limited data collection place the percentage of sex trafficking victims with HIV at about 25%, but actual numbers may be much higher. According to the Office of the Secretariat of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS, 63% of HIV-positive sufferers aged 15-24 are women.

A 2007 study published in JAMA showed that 38% of a study group of 287 sex trafficked Nepalese women and girls tested positive for HIV. The study also showed that the younger the trafficked girl, the higher the likelihood of being exposed to HIV since johns specifically request younger girls (under age 15) at brothels and johns often refuse to wear condoms and the prostituted women and girls realistically cannot compel them to.

Many other regions have much higher rates than that, such as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside where 75% of prostituted women and girls are HIV-positive. Women and children who are trafficked for commercial sex experience a tenfold risk of contracting HIV compared to any other subgroup of the population. The average age of entry into the sex trade for females is 12-14 years of age. The US is one of the top three source and destination hubs for sex trafficking.

According to the US State Department, 80% of human trafficking victims are women and girls, and according to the Harvard School of Public Health study authored by Dr. Jay Silverman, the HIV infection rate exceeded 60% among girls forced into prostitution prior to age 15 from the 2007 sample of 287 Nepalese women and girls. The public health consequence, and ultimately, the devastation to society caused by male demand for commercial sex is astronomical.

“Addressing the widely accepted male demand for commercial sex is critical to ending this modern day form of female slavery,” Silverman said.

As sex trafficking survivor Lisa Bouvet, said: “Saying someone chose to become a prostitute is like saying someone chose to jump off the roof but no one mentioned that the building was on fire.”

Those who manage to exit the sex trade also face a substantial risk of being re-trafficked if they are from a country that lacks adequate social and economic support systems because of the contempt, scorn, derision, neglect and social rejection suffered by the prostituted. Many exited women and girls, out of sheer desperation, re-enter the sex trade when they’re left with nowhere else to go and no real social and economic support because of the criminalization and stigma that comes with being a prostituted woman. And when that happens, chances of being able to re-escape and survive are almost zero.

Many exited women are unable to afford proper medical care and due to total social exclusion and marginalization, they have almost zero employment opportunities and no hope of economically fending for themselves. Almost no one will hire exited women due to the social stigma alone, and finding some middle class Prince Charming to rescue her from utter destitution by marrying her and supporting her so she has a home, food, and medical care is definitely off the table.

As an aside, a study of johns showed that upwards of 60% are married men with families—they bought prostituted women so they could get away with doing to a woman what they would never be able to do to their own wives. If you torture and kill one of the “madonnas”, you will likely get prison; if you torture and kill one of the “whores”, you will likely get a free pass and a pat on the back.

Convicted Child Molesters Get More Social Acceptance and Better Economic Support For Re-entering Society Than Sex Trafficking Survivors

According to Dr. Brian Conway of the University of British Columbia, people who contract HIV—the virus that causes AIDS—can live very, very long and high quality lives without ever developing full blown AIDS as long as their CD4 (white blood cell) count remains well above 200 on medical therapy. But the vast majority of exited women struggle in abject poverty, and in countries like the US and the impoverished regions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, destitute human trafficking survivors don’t have access to adequate medical treatment or any social income support to be able to live with dignity. Consequently, the sex trafficking survivors who contracted HIV from johns and traffickers are slapped with a cruel, torturous death sentence: slow, painful death from AIDS related complications.

Two major factors that negatively impact CD4 cell count are fatigue and stress. The stress from having to suffer in utter poverty and complete social exclusion due to stigma, compounded by the trauma levels of anyone who survived the amount of violence and torture as prostituted women have, only serves to intensify the agonizing progression of untreated HIV, which is hallmarked by ravaging and unrelenting opportunistic infections such as pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) which causes fatal treatment-resistant pneumonia for which medical intervention does not come cheap.

Untreated HIV is a certain death sentence, but it is a very slow and torturous one that surpasses the level of torture that would be permissible at Guantanamo. Treatment of HIV requires a series of antiretroviral drug therapies, of which there are several classes—each one inhibiting the mutation and multiplication of the HIV virus at different stages of cell invasion in the HIV virus’s life cycle. Often, several classes must be combined to effectively treat this devastating retrovirus which targets CD4 cells, injects healthy CD4 cells with its genetic code (RNA) which is then used by the reverse transcriptase enzyme to build HIV DNA.

The HIV DNA is injected into the CD4 cell’s DNA by the integrase enzyme, establishing HIV infection in the CD4 cell. When the HIV-infected CD4 cell reproduces, the HIV DNA is activated. This is how a retrovirus like HIV destroys the immune system and causes full blown AIDS—by attacking the body’s white blood cells. And this is why multi-faceted therapy drug schedules are needed to treat and subdue or limit the HIV virus’s activity within the body.

None of the current medical technologies for treating HIV can protect an HIV-positive person’s sexual partner from contracting HIV no matter how well the infected person responds to the antiretroviral therapy. So an HIV-positive john with access to good medical care and who is able to improve his healthy CD4 cell count and limit the devastation of HIV in his body, who then turns around and buys rape-on-demand sex from poor prostituted women (and likely refuses to wear a condom) then infects the trafficking victim who is unable to compel him to wear a condom—never mind dictate any other terms and conditions of the sex-for-money transaction. In fact, it is usually in attempting to refuse a particular sexual act that gets prostituted women murdered—if not by the john who wanted to hurt her as part of the “services” he paid for, then by the traffickers in whose eyes a “troublesome” woman’s life isn’t even worth eight cents.

Unlike the traffickers and the johns on sex tourism “vacations” at home and abroad who paid for the “right” to get “you-do-what-I-say” sex from prostituted women and children, poor trafficked and/or exited women that contracted HIV from these self-entitled sexually sadistic men that refused to wear condoms have little to no hope at all of living a long, high quality life if they cannot get proper care due to being from a country in which women do not enjoy equal rights with men, and a country that either does not have the medical technology of antiretroviral therapy available, or that does not provide good medical care to those unable to pay for it because of that country not having universal health care.

To be sentenced to death from full blown AIDS as a direct result of first being forcibly infected with it by cruel, sexually sadistic men that are carriers of HIV and secondly by lack of access to the same quality of medical care to adequately treat HIV that their class-privileged HIV-positive rapists enjoy, meets the definition of torture and crimes against humanity.

In the US, convicted serial killers sentenced to death row get more sympathy and avenues for legal redress and concern for their rights than an adult sex trafficking victim who struggled to exit “the life” against all odds. Regardless of where one stands on the death penalty issue, the fact is that the way the state is permitted to execute a convicted serial killer is restricted by Constitutional laws against cruel and unusual punishment and torture—which is why no one is executed by being drawn and quartered or burned alive at the stake like they were in medieval Europe.

It is also why the state cannot (in theory, anyway) execute someone with biological terrorism, and neither can an individual resort to that under Stand Your Ground Laws. Bioterrorism is precisely what traffickers and johns are doing by deliberately infecting prostituted women with a fatal, incurable STD. Women and children did not enter prostitution with HIV—traffickers and johns infected them with it.

It is a crime against humanity for any other identifiable group to be targeted for death by sexual torture, destitution and bioterrorism—except women. Do the math: 95% of the prostituted are women and girls, 94% of those living below poverty suffering without basic human needs are women and girls. Women comprise 52% of the population yet women have less than 2% of all good-paying blue-collar skilled trades jobs and science careers due to institutionalized sexism and discrimination. Men comprise 88% of the government leadership and lawmaking bodies, and men comprise 98% of the top 1% of the financial elite. Although 5% of the prostituted are boys and men, nearly 100% of the sex buyers are men. Money, privilege and power are gendered. And so is the institution of prostitution.

There are upwards of about 10 million trafficked women and girls trapped in prostitution in the US and only 200 shelter beds nationwide for women and girls who desperately want to exit but cannot. So the final question remains: will destitute exited women get helped with income support to live with a little bit of human dignity while they struggle to heal and rebuild their lives, or will this new anti-trafficking plan by the Obama administration merely serve as a boon for large charity executives? If this country is serious about the sex trafficking problem, then funds for destitute trafficking victims payable to the destitute exited women whether they exited 20 minutes ago or 20 years ago must come first before anyone else’s enrichment. What is needed is: income for destitute exiting/exited women to live with dignity as they try to get on their feet and rebuild their lives, medical care, dental care, therapy, advanced educations and/or vocational training and REAL job placement—guaranteed job slots for poor marginalized exited women.

Women Who Care About Women Don’t Bat For Team Patriarchy

By Jacqueline S. Homan, Author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

A “feminist” scolded her sisters for being righteously indignant about the capo-like behavior of patriarchy’s handmaidens and honorary men, saying that being critical of women who deliberately throw their sisters under the wheels of patriarchy’s shit train distracts from the primary focus of feminism. She says that discrediting these capos doesn’t do anything to help women as a class.

Well, I have a LOT to say about that.

Although it’s true that women didn’t initiate patriarchy, and although it’s also true that some women’s bad behavior is not the same as men’s behavior under male supremacy because of the undeniable power differential, failing to publicly discredit honorary men does a far greater disservice to feminism and to women as a class by giving these handmaidens a free pass just because “they’re women, too.”

Women who use their relative, albeit male-bequeathed, privileges to slam the glass ceiling’s trap door shut on all their other sisters, hurting disempowered and marginalized women the most, and who are NOT challenged for it by feminists, isolate and silence women whom they are consciously and deliberately helping the patriarchy to oppress and crush underfoot. It is women like that, especially if they claim to be feminists (which is supposed to be about liberating ALL women from male oppression) who are harming the feminist mission of women’s liberation — far more so than the het women and libfems who are fighting in the trenches for women’s liberation from male-imposed PIV and childbirth chattel slavery.

What would a poor, homeless teen girl think about “feminists” and feminism in general if women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, or Kathleen Passidomo are given a free pass by feminists for using their positions of power and privilege within patriarchy to force her to give birth to her rapist’s progeny because these successful, highly educated and politically well-positioned women acting as honorary men were defended by those who claim to be all about ending women’s oppression?

Would that woman or girl who is forced to go through pregnancy and childbirth against her will, no matter the physical and psychological harm to her, feel included as part of the very same oppressed group that feminists claim to be trying to liberate?

The Rosetta Stone of women’s oppression by men as a class IS forced pregnancy/childbirth, whether a woman is het or lesbian. And just because a woman is het, does that mean that forced childbirth is something she “deserves?”

When a 13-year-old girl asked Sharron Angle, a Nevada Republican Congressional candidate and retired public school teacher, if she would bend her “pro-life” stance to make an exception for rape and asked what she would say to a 13 yr old rape victim who got pregnant, Angle told the girl that the victim should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term and “just learn how to make lemonade out of the lemons life handed her.” What kind of message about feminism and feminists is being sent to women and girls when some feminists silently defend (or excuse) women like Sharron Angle for “being a victim of patriarchy, too?”

What message does it send to the average woman or underage girl who doesn’t want to be forced to give birth against her will when the liberators of women won’t speak out against women using their administrative, judicial or legislative (or even their basic voting power) to pass laws to force childbirth on her, when the liberators don’t even pretend to fight for HER human rights — namely the right to NOT be conscripted into forced organ donation (which is what forced pregnancy/childbirth really is). The right to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity form the first pillar of bioethics, and also form the basis of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and are outlined the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In fact, the legal language in the UN Convention Against Torture defines “torture” to include “rape, sexual assault, and forced pregnancy.”

When former vice presidential candidate and Alaskan governor Sarah Palin passed a law in her state forcing rape victims to pay for their own rape kits at about $1,200 a clip and signed other laws that put access to birth control and safe legal abortion out of reach for underage girls and poor and working class women, what kind of message to the majority of women — who are far more socio-economically class-oppressed than Sarah Palin on top of being sex-oppressed — are feminists sending when they say that Sarah Palin isn’t to blame for using her office to strip the majority of our sisters of basic human rights, including her own daughter’s, just to further her political career in patriarchy?

How is defending women who are enemies of women helpful to feminism’s goal of ending male oppression of women? How many “average Janes” is it acceptable to sacrifice so as to not hurt the feelings of a few honorary men and handmaidens who sacrificed their own daughters on the patriarchal altar of this phallocracy?

Most women and girls don’t have a fraction of the privileges and power (even if it is male-assigned) that Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Michele Bachmann, and Kathleen Passidomo (who publicly called 11-year-old gang rape victims “prostitutes”) have. How is throwing the majority of women and girls under the bus consistent with the core tenets and principles of feminism? In order to stay focused on liberating women as a class from the oppression by men as a class, feminists cannot excuse or defend the harm inflicted by these honorary men by saying that “they are not like men.” That defeats the whole purpose of feminism. Putting it bluntly: It’s pissing up a crooked rope.

You cannot help women as a class by throwing the majority of women and girls under the bus for the sake of a few handmaidens who don’t want to be liberated (and who don’t want the rest of us to be liberated either) because they’re more than happy to serve in the ranks of patriarchy’s phalanx of Stepford capos because they’ve sold their souls for some lentil soup in exchange for doing men’s dirty work.

That “feminists can’t criticize other women” crap is precisely what helped cause the 30+ year erosion of the few hard-won rights for ALL women to have access to birth control and safe legal abortion (which are major life-savers for women) to the point where we’re at today where not only are America’s poorest women (who number in the tens of millions) without access to birth control and safe legal abortion, but rape victims are being FORCED to give birth against their will while lawmakers and others in positions or privilege and power have denied America’s poorest women food, cash support, and medical care on top of legalizing rape [e.g., Pennsylvania House Bill No. 2718] by making it practically impossible for a woman to prove she was raped — in a society that says she “asked for it”; a society that threw 300+ women in prison to date for the “crime” of having a stillbirth or miscarriage. A society that supports rapists over victims, and tells junior high and high school girls that they must share their locker room, shower and sauna with someone who has a penis in the name of “transgendered rights.” A society in which women suffering fatal pregnancy complications are left to suffer and die and “bleed out” in 1 out of 6 US hospital emergency rooms as a matter of policy because some hospital administrators’/executives’/doctors’ right to “freedom of religion” trumps pregnant women’s human rights to life, bodily autonomy, and bodily integrity — contravening the federal law that was supposed to prevent these abuses ( the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA), as well as the United Nations Convention against Torture, which the United States ratified in 1994.

The War on Women was not launched by a couple of fringe crackpots in the Republican Party without a huge groundswell of entrenched misogyny and self-centeredness of a whole society of accomplices — including women with a significant degree of political clout, and social and financial capital who, in the name of feminism, defend the enemies of feminism and in doing so, silence the very people whom feminism is supposed to be helping: the overwhelming majority of women who are stuck between the shit and the stink of having to make choiceless choices within the dictates of patriarchy just to be able to survive.

And what are these choiceless choices? Answer: Survival sex (the sex trade). Or attaching themselves to male partners and breadwinners under male terms and conditions in order to survive. Compulsory PIV sex without condoms. Mandatory childbirth (for lack of access to birth control and abortion), which even reduces what few low-paying job opportunities within the pink-collar ghetto that are available to most women which in turn forces economic dependence on abusive, selfish males or the practically non-existent and grossly inadequate welfare benefits (which poor women are begrudged).

Why defend the female enemies of women who are the willing and eager tools of patriarchy when they could have chosen NOT to be, in the name of an abstract ideology that is not being put into real down-to-earth practice to help ALL women? How does that extinguish the inferno of patriarchy when it silences the victims of it, leaving the majority of women behind to fend for themselves while telling them in so many words, “Sorry sister, you’re on your own to liberate yourself” — just because the delicate sensibilities of a few faux feminists, handmaidens and honorary men are more important than ending patriarchy by attacking the oppressor (men) AND the oppressor’s willing agents?

Women who care about women don’t bat for Team Patriarchy, or defend those who do — even though women are not like men.

Having a Vagina and Uterus is Not a Lifestyle Choice

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Divine Right and Classism For Dimwits

In the past 35 years’ onslaught on women’s basic human right to bodily autonomy (i.e. specifically to reproductive choice) under the “pro-life” banner, the anti-woman/pro-forced birth movement — 77% whom are male, 100% whom will never be pregnant — has never promoted any laws to protect women from unwanted pregnancies in the first place, thus eliminating about 90% of all early term abortions, which comprise 88% of all abortions according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. As an aside, most early term abortions are due to birth control failure. The risk of death from pregnancy complications increases exponentially for women over age 35, and the time a woman spends vulnerable to pregnancy spans from menarche to menopause — about 40 years of her life.

The hazards, rigors, risks, side effects, pain and trauma of childbearing are rarely talked about in these abortion “debates.” Neither is the vulnerability of destitute and homeless pregnant women and the extra hazards that pregnancy imposes on them in their already precarious situation. The “pro-life” faction has never valued or protected the lives of vulnerable women, and for the most part, the majority of men never cared about women. Viagra is doled out like water at a marathon and is covered by almost all insurance plans, including Medicaid, to ensure that every selfish jerk who refuses to wear a condom can get it up but what about all the poor women that get pregnant as a result? Who takes care of them?

Reproductive abuse against women far out-ranks the number of women who get pregnant to “trap a man.” A study published by Dr. Elizabeth Miller in the September/October 2007 issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics confirms this — 25% of the young women surveyed reported incidents of abusive partners who tried to force them to get pregnant against their will by sabotaging their birth control and manipulating condom use.

The same mentality that thinks it’s perfectly OK to treat women as disposable reproductive chattel who should be forced to get/remain pregnant against our will with no concern for what permanent physical and psychological damage that such a traumatic thing poses for us — never mind care about how the reproductive “livestock” feels about it — is the same mentality that rationalizes that it’s OK “rent” a woman’s vagina for an hour and do whatever they want to that woman’s body since they “paid for it.”

Men as a class have all the money (because men get the lion’s share of all the good-paying jobs), sexual entitlements and political voice, and that gives them power as a class over women’s sexuality and reproduction. That power is tied to violence and force. When sugar-coating fails, violence in the form of misogynistic male-centric laws eliminating access to birth control and abortion clinic violence follows — it’s carrot-and-stick dominance. Men get to say who they fuck, when, and under what terms and conditions irrespective of how the woman feels about it or what it might do to her as a result (frequently couched in terms of “consequences” that only women “deserve”). Freedom and social justice for only half the citizenry is not freedom and social justice at all.

When men watch medical education videos of pregnancy complications and videos of live natural childbirths and they see the tremendous pain and trauma that women suffer trying to give birth, nearly ALL of them say “thank god I have a penis.” But what you will never hear any of them say is: “I don’t want my sister/niece/wife/girlfriend/daughter to be forced to go through that against her will just because she had sex.”

Newsflash: Having a uterus, ovaries, and a vagina is not a “lifestyle choice.”

Misogyny and the oppression of women as a class does not occur in a vacuum. The oppression of women happens because of consent through silence and indifference by those who have the most unearned privileges and who get to dictate all the rules, policies, customs, norms, and traditions in this society. The onus for dismantling oppression created in this system of unearned privileges rests on those who have privilege.

Since birth rates have jumped as a result of limited access to reliable contraception and abortion through “conscience clause” laws and “fetal personhood” laws enacted in many states, our maternal death and disability rates surpass those in some Third World countries — serving as grim reminders that women are the last to be taken care of in this society. People utterly disregard the pregnant woman as if anything she suffers as a result of being forced to give birth doesn’t matter, usually articulated as “you should have kept your legs shut” and “just have the baby and put it up for adoption” when it’s pregnancy and childbirth that are exactly what a woman seeking birth control and/or having an abortion wants to avoid — for very good reasons!

Since the passage of Roe v. Wade up until the recent Planned Parenthood clinic closings, 40 million women safely terminated unwanted pregnancies. During that same period, 21 million women died from pregnancy complications or during/shortly after giving birth. 400 million women have sustained debilitating permanent health problems, side effects, disabling childbirth injuries, and disfigurement which utterly destroyed their lives. A woman dies in childbirth every 90 seconds, according to WHO and Amnesty International. This is what male privilege costs women. Getting stuck in traffic is an inconvenience; being forced by law and public policy to go through pregnancy and childbirth against your will and having to suffer all the inherent risks and side effects is more than just a mere “inconvenience.”

According to obstetric specialist and colorectal surgeon Dr. Michele Thornton,  about 40% of all Western women who have given birth sustain pelvic floor damage, leaving them with permanent fecal and urinary incontinence — undermining their confidence, wrecking their sex lives (which destroys marriages), and eliminating their ability to function in any job. Dr. Thornton also states that the problem is underreported because many women are too ashamed and embarrassed to tell their spouses and partners, let alone tell their doctors. Even when the surgical repair of fistulas caused by obstructed labors, episiotomies and tears is successful, the permanent physical limitations and compromised organ tissue’s integrity remain permanent, costing women everything from being able to participate in society to being able to have a normal sex life to being able to keep their jobs or get hired at new ones. Maureen Treadwell at the Birth Trauma Association confirms this devastation and frequent occurrence of this “silent epidemic.” The trauma from the emotional and physical fallout left many women unable to contemplate another baby.

As to the argument that pregnancy and childbirth — particularly childbirth without pain relief — are “natural” to the female condition and that biology is destiny, there’s nothing logical about equating “natural” to “safe” and fate. The natural course for appendicitis without medical remedy is 30% chance of death from peritonitis. Who in their right mind would deny a person remedy for that natural infliction on the human condition?

And if it’s “only natural” to force women to endure pregnancy and childbirth against our will when we don’t want to or can’t handle it for whatever reason, then why the need for unnatural man-made laws to forcibly deprive women of access to contraception and abortion? If this was all so natural with everyone “in their place”, women would only have sex when pregnancy was the goal.

Many women’s bodies don’t handle pregnancy well.  Not all women  suffer the worst results of pregnancy and childbirth, but there’s no way to accurately predict which women will and which won’t — it’s a real crap shoot even under the best of terms and conditions.  Here is a short partial list of the permanent and often irreversible changes to a woman’s body caused by pregnancy and birth which really makes the shot-gun wedding or the 18 years of monthly child support checks (if she gets it), and inadequate, meager temporary welfare benefits look like a cheap kiss-off:

Normal or expectable side effects of pregnancy:

• exhaustion

• gestational diabetes – can remain permanent as Type II diabetes

• altered appetite

• nausea and vomiting

• heartburn and indigestion

• constipation

• weight gain

• hypothyroidism

• dizziness and light-headedness

• bloating, swelling, fluid retention

• hemorrhoids
• hematoma (usually on the vulva but can be on the inside of the vagina)

• abdominal cramps

• yeast infections

• congested/bloody nose

• acne and skin disorders

• skin discoloration

• mild to severe backache and strain

• increased headaches

• difficulty/discomfort with sleeping

• increased urination/incontinence

• gum disease (leading to premature tooth loss)

• pica

• breast pain and discharge

• swelling of joints, leg cramps, joint pain

• difficulty sitting/standing in later pregnancy

• inability to take regular medications

• shortness of breath

• higher blood pressure

• hair loss (this is a permanent side effect)

• anemia

• inability to participate in some sports and activities

• high susceptibility to infection (pregnant women have a much lower immunity to illness, infection and disease than non-pregnant women or men because the pregnant woman’s immune system has to literally shut down so her system’s antibodies don’t attack the implanted fertilized ovum)

• extreme pain during labor and delivery (which can last for several hours to several days)

• hormonal mood changes, including post-partum depression

• post-partum psychosis/birth related PTSD (caused by a birth that was traumatic for the woman)

• extended post-partum recovery period and exhaustion (a difficult vaginal birth or a C-section can take a year or more to fully recover)

Normal, expectable, and frequent permanent side effects of pregnancy and birth:

• stretch marks

• loose skin

• permanent weight gain or redistribution

• permanent change to pelvic skeletal and ligament structure — it is not uncommon for a woman’s hips to be 4” wider than normal for the passage of the fetus during birth as her pelvic bone opens and ligaments stretch, and often this change is permanent, leaving many women unable to EVER get back into their pre-pregnancy clothes even if they lose ALL their pregnancy weight (leaving poor women who are unable to afford to go out and buy all new clothes with absolutely nothing to wear except a couple pairs of oversized sweatpants and maybe one or two donated used maternity outfits)

• abdominal and vaginal muscle weakness that Kegels won’t necessarily prevent or fix

• pelvic floor disorder (causing urinary and fecal incontinence and severely diminished quality of life, try re-entering the workforce with a problem like that!)

• difficulty resuming employment due to lifting restrictions imposed by permanent pelvic floor damage from pregnancy stress and/or childbirth injuries.

• changes to breasts (saggy and “deflated”)

• varicose veins

• disfigurement/scarring from episiotomy or C-section

• other permanent aesthetic changes to the body (which can be devastating to a woman’s life chances for everything from finding a marriage partner to getting a good job in a culture that emphasizes women’s value on youth, thinness and beauty)

• hemorrhoids

• loss of dental or bone calcium (tooth decay/loss and osteoporosis)

Occasional complications and side effects:

• domestic violence (pregnant women are more at risk for being murdered by boyfriends and husbands than non-pregnant women)

• hyperemesis gravidarum (kidney failure, requiring surgery and kidney stent)

• obstructed labor (caused by fetal malpresentation, large babies, fetal shoulder dystochia resulting in internal pelvic organ tissues to necrotize)

• permanent injury to back (late pregnancy and delivery)

• severe lacerations, tissue scarring requiring surgery (especially after additional pregnancies)

• prolapsed uterus/vagina (risk increases tremendously after additional pregnancies and pelvic floor weaknesses)

• pre-eclampsia (the most common pregnancy complication — edema and hypertension associated with 10% of all pregnancies, mostly among older pregnant women; a precursor to eclampsia, which is fatal)

• eclampsia (convulsions, seizures, coma during pregnancy or labor, fatal unless pregnancy is aborted)

• gestational diabetes which often remains permanent in the form of Adult Type II diabetes – resulting in permanent debilitating health condition requiring medication, often leading to blindness and limb amputations (aggravated by lack of ability to afford healthy food low in starches and sugars)

• placenta previa (causes laboring women to bleed to death during delivery)

• thrombocytopenic purpura (causing women to bleed to death during/immediately after birth)

• severe cramping

• embolism (blood clots, air bubbles, amniotic fluid bubbles escaping into circulatory system causing stroke or massive heart attack; usually fatal)

• medical disability requiring total bed rest

• diastasis recti (abdominal muscle separation/tears)

• mitral valve stenosis (causes heart failure, stroke, and pulmonary edema)

• lack of resistance to highly infectious diseases

• hormonal imbalance (causes weight problems, depression, and breast and reproductive organ cancer)

• ectopic pregnancy (fatal unless medically aborted)

• broken bones (rib cage and lower spine from fetal pressure in late pregnancy and during delivery)

• hemorrhage

• refractory gastroesophegal reflux disease

• aggravation of pre-pregnancy conditions/diseases (epilepsy, diabetes, heart condition, high blood pressure, etc)

• permanently ruined sex life from injury to the nerves and tissues of the sexual organs (caused by 3^rd and 4^th degree vaginal tears, episiotomies, etc. during delivery often accompanied by permanent fecal and/or urinary incontinence)

• elevated risks for certain cancers

Serious complications causing permanent problems associated with pregnancy, labor and delivery:

• peripartum cardiomyopathy (weakened heart)

• cardiopulmonary arrest (fatal: irreversible brain damage and death occurs within 4 minutes)

• magnesium toxicity

• severe hypoxemia/acidosis

• massive embolism

• increased inter-cranial pressure, brainstem infarction (An Alzheimer-like forgetfulness from brain matter shrinkage called “mommy brains”)

• molar pregnancy/ gestational trophoblastic disease (a mass of abnormal/malignant tissue growth from the placenta)

• malignant arrhythmia ( coronary artery spasms)

• circulatory collapse

• obstetric fistula – (tear/hole due to tissue damage from pressure to the area separating the vagina from the rectum or the vagina from the bladder; causing urine and/or feces to pass through the vagina uncontrollably. Fistulas require surgery and are not always able to be repaired even after several subsequent surgeries)

• colostomy – caused by an irreparable obstetric fistula

More permanent side effects:

• future infertility

• autoimmune disease – caused by lingering Y-chromosomes from carrying a male fetus

• ovarian cancer – caused by elevated estrogen levels due to pregnancy

• breast cancer

• permanent disability

• death

If pregnancy was a drug, the FDA would have banned it decades ago. Instead of enacting any measures that enable women and girls to defend themselves from unwanted pregnancies, every “pro-life” measure is backdoor sexual prohibition against women — from the Hyde Amendment to the “fetal personhood” laws and “conscience clause” laws to discriminatory clinic zoning regulations and unaffordable (and invasive) mandatory vaginal ultrasounds — restricting or eliminating access to birth control and abortion, deliberately targets women to punish them with pain, physical and economic encumbrance, trauma, debilitating health problems, risk of disability or death, and disfigurement for the “crime” of having sex.

The “pro-life” bloc refuses to admit this. They trivialize the harm to women and even justify it in terms that preserve unearned male privilege at the expense of women’s human rights by claiming that it’s “all about the baby” and that we should “punish rapists, not the unborn” — as if this somehow makes it perfectly OK to subject women to torture, cruelty, disfigurement, enslavement, permanent bodily damage and possible death against their will without any regard for how the reproductive “livestock” feels about it, or if we survive the ordeal. The only ones “pro-lifers” are interested in punishing are not rapists, but those whose bodies incur 100% of the risks and side effects of pregnancy and birth: women.

Griswold v. Connecticut (passed in 1965) framed the right to access contraception as a “marital privacy” right. Roe v. Wade (passed in 1973) quite specifically made the balance between a woman’s human rights to life and bodily autonomy and the fetus very reasonable and fair. But the predominantly white male rapists’ rights political bowel movement persisted under the “morality” banner and succeeded in chipping away at Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut over the last 35 years to the point where a woman’s basic human right to have control over her own body exists in name only.

The pro-forced gestational enslavement movement never cared about “the unborn” except to use a fetus to shame and injure its “slutty” mother; otherwise an artificial stand-alone uterus would have been invented by now to facilitate the transplantation of a blastocyst/zygote from an unwilling female host with minimal risk to her, creating a win-win situation. But fascists rarely compromise.

Abstinence-only until marriage has been a major epic fail.  A marriage license is not contraception and doesn’t prevent any pregnancy that a woman cannot handle/does not want to carry, and abstinence in a marriage is not conducive to nurturing and preserving marriages and families in a nation that already has a 50% divorce rate. Adoption is not the solution to unwanted pregnancy; it’s the solution for those who don’t want to parent the child after it’s born. When a woman does not want to be pregnant, the drive to become un-pregnant is as strong, if not stronger, than the natural forces that want her to stay pregnant. And then she will seek an abortion and do anything to get one, whether it is safe and legal or not. That is fact.

Those cloaking their misogyny in the habiliments of “morality” say that sex is for procreation only, and should only be engaged in when childbearing is the plan. But that flies in the face of reality. Humans, unlike many other mammals, do not have seasons for going into heat. We can reproduce at any time of the year. As a highly social species, we have sex for purely pleasurable reasons and emotional pair-bonding most of the time without wanting to have a pregnancy result with each encounter. There is nothing “sinful” or “slutty” about that. That is reality.

As a bipedal species with large brains, pregnancy and childbirth is exceptionally hazardous for women. When you see a mother, you’re looking at someone who suffered through a physically grueling experience with permanent battle scars that aren’t a pretty Norman Rockwell picture. Pregnancy is not a benign health condition — a cold hard fact that has been sanitized and romanticized with too much quackery. Not too long ago, pregnancy and childbirth killed about one fifth of American women.

A ruined body is the least of the hazards, although aesthetics should not be downplayed in a society where a woman’s life chances for everything from job opportunities to finding a life mate to gaining/keeping social acceptance hinges on being thin and “attractive looking” enough — whether we like to admit it or not. And not all women are able to “snap back” after childbirth, even if they did “all the right things” during pregnancy and after giving birth. Often, pregnancy fat never goes completely away. This is non-trivial considering the devastating emotional effects of poor body image suffered by women and girls as a direct result of the pornification of advertizing in which an unrealistic standard of beauty is upheld as “normal” and males drive this by making cruel and cutting comments about women’s bodies that fail to meet this unreasonable criteria.

In addition to these personal expectations, husbands, family members, friends, and media images add to the pressure, warning that having a baby is no excuse for “letting yourself go.” Yet few women are able to regain their pre- pregnancy figures. Childbearing and the passage of time change bodies in irrevocable ways. According to the Department of Health & Human Services, eating disorders among pregnant women has reached epidemic proportions. Incidences of bulimia have tripled since the 1980s and anorexia incidences have also risen, according to studies collected by the National Eating Disorders Association.

Forced childbirth is tantamount to FGM and sexual torture, considering that 85-90%  of all women who give birth naturally suffer vaginal tears and/or episiotomies which are extremely painful and traumatizing, often resulting in long-term debilitating health conditions. Deprivation of my human rights would never be acceptable if I were a man. Who today would debate the “right” to own slaves?

Forced pregnancy and childbirth is no more moral than any other form of forced organ donation. No “pro-life” laws exist anywhere that force men to suffer trauma, pain, permanent damage to their bodies and risk of death from mandatory kidney donation surgery to save the life of another — even if the person in need of it is their own child who would otherwise die without it. No one has the right to the use of, or to coerce the use of, another’s body — in whole or in part — against their will.

Consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. Medical ethics and philosophy professor David Boonin framed the argument supporting a woman’s right to choose based on consent. A woman has the right to refuse use of her body to support another potential human’s continued existence if:

1. The cost is not trivial (even “good” pregnancies in healthy women of optimal childbearing age are non-trivial).
2. The woman has not previously consented to the exact conditions of use, or the conditions which she consented to have changed.
3. The woman does not owe the recipient (fetus) compensation for causing its worsened condition.

Boonin quite specifically excludes a woman who conceived following consensual sex from obligation to provide life support for that developing entity. The fetus would not have existed without this act and its accompanying male act, and is therefore better off — not worse off. The female host has not caused any harm to the fetus at all and is therefore not required to compensate it by being an incubator. The fetus on the other hand, is harming its host, and is therefore obligated to her. And the male that has caused the woman harm by impregnating her when she didn’t want to become pregnant is therefore obligated to compensate her.

Any woman who wants to gestate some “pump and dump” ungrateful prick’s genetic material for patriarchy’s benefit in almost a year of involuntary servitude is more than welcome to do so. But no woman owes such sacrifice and martyrdom to anyone — especially not to a society that has always treated women like garbage; a society that grants full personhood to 15 second old zygotes and corporations while denying that very status of personhood to the woman in whose body that zygote is being hosted.

Forcing women to get and remain pregnant against their will is a violation of human rights, period. The architects of the UN and Article 7(g) of the Rome Statute agree. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in addressing the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole” has provided an international legal definition of rape. The Rome Statute has acknowledged sexual assault as both a war crime and also as a crime against humanity. The Rome Statute was adopted and opened for signature on July 17^th 1998 and was entered into force on July 1^st 2002. There are 139 signatories and 89 state parties to the statute. The Rome Statute establishes a permanent ICC body with jurisdiction over individuals limited to the crimes within its jurisdiction to prosecute. The Rome Statute defines these serious crimes as the crime of “genocide; crimes against humanity; war crimes; and the crime of aggression.”

Article 7(g) of the Rome Statute states: “crimes against humanity means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with knowledge of the attack: Rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.” Article 7(g) also includes the “persecution against any identifiable group or collectively on gender…or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law” as well as “other inhumane acts of similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

Now, this War on Women did not occur out of the blue. It began with the concept of idolizing “invade and conquer” ideologies, male-centric cults of hero worship, and the promotion of wealth accumulation through deracination and turning everything (including women) in the natural world into disposable commodities for the sole purpose of converting them into dead capital.

What we have is a predator society based on misogyny, racism, and capitalistic competition and that predation fosters aggression and manifests itself in our “culture of rape.” That we lead the world in producing serial killers speaks truth to power about the casualties of male privilege, patriarchy and capitalism. It is not the perpetrators who are solely responsible for our inequality but also those who are sitting on the sidelines doing nothing about it except covering their own asses by excluding themselves from wrongdoing. Doing nothing in situations of injustice is the same as being an enabler. Silence is consent.

Solidarity for the Few

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right

This movement struck me as being centered on young middle class white males, and they’re not welcoming or receptive of older people — including older people who have a lifetime’s worth of experience and battle scars from fighting the oppression created by unearned privilege. And according to Reena Walker, a seasoned older black woman and veteran activist, male privilege and how it is used by men in the 99% to beat women down and oppress us is ignored or rationalized by a busload of mansplaining. As a black woman who suffered a lifetime of poverty, sexism, racism and misogyny, Ms. Walker is hardly one of the 1% and yet the way she and other women are being treated at OWS sends the message that women (who make up 51% of the 99%) aren’t viewed as being human enough for harm against us to matter. Funny how freedom and economic justice is only for a few which usually does not include women. Some 99%ers are more equal than others.

It is no accident that women comprise over 70% of those living below poverty worldwide. The status quo of local and global capitalism depends on women’s unpaid/under-paid work. It could not survive without women’s unpaid work as primary caregivers, the childbearers, and the child-raisers. Capitalism is patriarchal to the core. The poorest of the world’s poor are women who also do upwards of two-thirds of the world’s work and own only 1% of the means of production and reproduction. Women hold up half the sky on our unpaid/under-paid backs.

Despite all of the claims by Occupy facilitators that rapes are not occurring at the Occupy Toronto camp at St. James Park, a few men from the Aboriginal community who are staying in the camp full time say otherwise. One of those men, identifying himself only as “Davine”, who is half Blackfoot and half Arab, said that the camp’s marshals have not been able to minimize or prevent sexual assaults on the women there and that “these [white] people are coming to us Natives for help.” What is really tragic in all this is that one of those Natives — Jayson Fleury — is a real opportunistic shmuck and sociopathic grifter who has ripped off poor and marginal women to support his lifestyle of partying across Canada 3-4 times a year. And he is one of a tiny handful of men who is willing to protect the women from rape. How sad is that?

What is supposed to be a movement about unity of the masses against the 1% is really looking more like the same ol’ same ol’: freedom and economic justice and a bigger slice of the pie for men; rape, invalidation, exploitation, abuse, oppression and discrimination against the poorest and most downtrodden victims of capitalism — poor women of ALL races. Somehow, I don’t find that very unifying, uplifting, or liberating as a poor and marginal woman.

And please don’t tell me that women’s human rights — including the right to a job with dignity, the right to an education, the right to food, housing, and healthcare, and the right to reproductive/sexual enfranchisement and bodily autonomy/self-determination, and most important of all, the right to NOT be raped and impregnated against our will at peril to our health, well-being, liberty, and lives — is less important that “the big picture” of those traditionally privileged members of the 99% getting their justice at poor and destitute women’s expense in the name of “social justice.” Sorry, but I’m not down with that.

As a woman from deep poverty who suffered more under capitalism than poor men due to institutionalized sexism, misogyny, and the social acceptance of patriarchy and its culture of rape, I have no interest in “taking one for the team” for the sake of the 99% movement (which is looking more like a Rapists’ Rights bowel movement) just so men can get a bigger slice of the economic pie while nothing changes for the better for women, especially poor and marginal women of all races.

Since colonization of North America, women in the US and Canada have been told to wait until after the men got all the more important issues resolved and then we women would eventually get our turn. But our turn never came — at least not for those of us in extreme poverty that never got to make it to even the lowest rung of the middle class. But then this Occupy movement has never been about us, has it?

A glaring example is the Occupy Vancouver list of demands included a call for the legalization of prostitution. Prostitution is rich white male-centered. It exists because capitalism is patriarchal and there’s a direct link between that and human trafficking and rape. Also at the crux of it is the larger societal view of women as non-persons, as cheap commodities that exist solely for male self-gratification.  These issues cannot be bifurcated.

Desperation, poverty, abuse, addiction, job and pay discrimination, lack of opportunities and a need to pay the rent and feed the kids, a history of colonialism, racism, sexism, and a misogynistic culture that devalues women and reduces us to disposable products to be bought and sold — all act in synergy to create a society where prostitution and sex trafficking exists and flourishes with men being the prime beneficiaries of it while women are further victimized.

What kind of social justice movement seeking to rectify the injustices of capitalism and the inclusion of women in the name of solidarity is this, anyway?

Why is the response to the rapes, the abuse, the exploitation, the trauma and the deaths that many poor and marginal women suffer as a result of being prostituted to simply treat this as “just another job”? What other job demands that the worker be raped, impregnated against their will, infected with an STD, violated, abused, and maybe even murdered? What kind of person supports that this sort of treatment should be legitimized? What kind of person seeking solidarity with women — especially poor and marginal women — would agree that women’s bodies should just be another disposable commodity available for purchase by men and that every woman should be OK with that?

Women need to be safe, but how safe are women when we’re not even viewed as full human beings? Yes, prostituted women deserve rights. But they also deserve to have real choices. Why would anyone think that johns will provide equitable treatment and respect for women? No man who thinks he has the right to trade in human flesh or take a woman against her will is a man who believes in real equality. A man who can do this is a man who doesn’t see women as being human enough for harm against us to matter. We should not have to accept and legalize exploitation and oppression from men in order to decriminalize the women being prostituted in the name of “unity.”

Legalized prostitution neatly sweeps under the wraps the insidious human rights catastrophe of the global human/sex trafficking industry. Women ensnared in that are literally forced into brutal sex slavery; bought and sold, beaten and raped over and over and over. Approximately 80% of those trafficked are women and girls. The average age of a trafficking victim is 14. The average life span once trafficked is 4 years. The victims usually die from HIV/AIDS related complications after being forced (often violently) to give unprotected sex to their male purchasers. Legalizing and sugar-coating the exploitation of women does not protect our human rights. It undermines them.

A genuine unity and people’s movement doesn’t consider women’s suffering irrelevant, or as a trivial “special interest”, or as titillating grist. Nor does it function as a microcosm of this capitalist economy with men competing for all the power, wealth, and status at the top while women serve as mere cheerleaders and poster children only to be trotted out for the convenience and benefit of male privilege.

Women deserve safety and decriminalized from doing what they have to do in order to survive, but women also deserve to have real options. As 51% of the population, women should be 51% represented in all mainstream jobs, instead of being herded into pink collar-ghettos, and the sub-poverty glass ceiling of Wal-Mart with the exploitative sex industry as the only other option available for poor women for whom college and grad school is as out of reach as a day trip to Sedna while male high school drop-outs and ex-felons get all the good-paying blue-collar union jobs in the skilled trades and all of the opportunities and hope for a better life that goes with that at the expense of women’s exclusion.

Women make up more than half of the 99%. Where is our liberation from male oppression and domination through rape, “honor killing”, FGM, hiring and pay discrimination, sexual and reproductive slavery, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence which are the all too common realities of women’s lives every day?  These are the realities that are disproportionally inflicted on poor and marginal women by men in the 99%. Yet these are all dismissed as “special interest issues” that are accepted as part of “the price of being born female”, which is why anti-oppression is needed.  And that is why a movement of unity for real social and economic change must be willing to accept constructive criticism and not get offended when male privilege is challenged.

What is uplifting, unifying, or liberating about Occupy camp facilitators designating untrained peers as “marshals” to serve as the “sexual assault response team” to deal with the rapes — not by offering rape kits that include emergency contraception and STD testing/treatment, and the arrest/removal of the rapist, but by counseling (read: pressuring) the women who’ve been raped against going to the police? (Not that the criminal justice system has ever been any panacea for women, especially rape victims — police, lawyers, and judges are products of the same patriarchal, misogynist, fetid capitalist sepulcher that has always oppressed and abused women through unearned male privilege at women’s expense. )

I have no interest in being ill-used and thrown under the bus for the sake of “solidarity” with fauxgressives just so that men can get justice while nothing changes for the better for poor women of all races.

If destitute and marginal women of all races are at these camps, it is because this shit is real for us. We have been the most oppressed, the most excluded, the most downtrodden, and the most harmed by the inherent injustices of capitalism which is inherently a gender war. Chronically poor and marginal women don’t have the safety nets that young working class and middle class white males have: the freedom from potentially life-threatening unwanted pregnancy, or the privilege of a job and/or families with resources to return to at the end of all this.

Forced Childbirth To Blame For Illegal Abortion Clinics and Our “Sex-Negative” Culture

Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

The “pro-life” anti-abortion/anti-contraception misogynist backlash against women’s hard-won right to bodily autonomy accorded by Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut was launched by various wealthy conservative Congressmen and male dominated Christian organizations the moment women were recognized as being entitled to the fundamental human right to have some minimal say over our own bodies.

The backlash began with the punitive Hyde Amendment which targeted poor women for conscription into childbirth chattel slavery under false pretenses of “morality” by blocking Medicaid funding for abortion, even in the case of rape or danger to the mother’s health and life.

Poor women were deemed exceptionally promiscuous and “animalistic”, thus sub-human and in need of punishment for having sex outside of the auspices of patriarchy’s stranglehold. Reticence to fight Hyde head on and failure to repeal Hyde allowed misogyny, cruelty, enslavement, and sexual/reproductive torture against women and girls to remain normalized.

Normalizing abuse and deprivation of human rights for half of the human race was accepted because of the Hyde Amendment, and because of humanitarian pro-choice groups’ collective failure to press the case of Roe v. Wade as a non-discriminatory natural human right — not just a constitutionally framed privacy right.

The Hyde Amendment was introduced in 1973 immediately on the heels of the US Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade. Hyde passed in 1978, sending the message and reaffirming the patriarchal notion that any woman engaging in sex for pleasure without the intent of procreation is an immoral slut. It also sent the message that the fundamental human right to bodily autonomy is a social class privilege reserved for the discreet enjoyment of rich women, but a basic human right for ALL men. This classist, sexist, misogynist message was reaffirmed in 1980 by the US Supreme Court in its ruling on the Harris v. McRae case.

Abortion was castigated as “immoral” and the taxpayers should not be obligated to subsidize something morally repulsive. Prior to Roe and Griswold v. Connecticut, women had two choices: risk death from dangerous childbirth or risk death from botched illegal abortions performed by black market back alley butchers. For poor women across the US today, the situation remains the same.

Since Hyde was passed, Medicaid has not paid for a single abortion for poor women impregnated by rape, incest, or in situations where continuing the pregnancy seriously compromised the woman’s health or threatened her life. Consequently, untold numbers of low-income women were forced to endure a health and life risk imposed on them. Rape victims were thus violated twice: first by their rapists, second by being forced to suffer dangerous unwanted pregnancies and excruciatingly painful childbirths that permanently changed their bodies and lives against their will — leaving their bodies and psyches (often permanently) damaged.

The “Moral Majority” justified this legalized torture, chattel enslavement, and abuse of women and girls under the false pretense of a “pro-life” position. But their claim of a moral high ground fails miserably. In all of their rhetoric about the “sanctity of life”, the life, health, liberty, and wellbeing of women — whose wombs they’ve held hostage and whose pussies they’ve deliberately injured by force of law — has been completely disregarded. This just goes to show that they really don’t give a crap about life. They’ve written off the already-born, living, feeling, breathing, thinking woman who is demonstrably more of a person than any potential contents her uterus may (or may not) warehouse.

The reason they devalue women as people and refuse to acknowledge that women are human enough for harm to matter is because they truly hate women. Women’s genitalia are “nasty” and “evil” to them, so forcing women to suffer permanent injury or maiming to their genitals from childbirth fulfills a deep seeded desire to destroy and inflict torture and trauma on women’s very sensitive sexual organs suits them just fine.

Institutionalized misogyny with horrific consequences for women began with Bronze Age superstitions promulgated by some desert nomads’ vindictive deity — as told in the Biblical myth of the “original sin.”

Misogyny and a strong irrational desire to inflict trauma and death on women is the underpinning of western civilization. Patriarchal Neolithic scribes supplanted a powerful preceding tradition of matriarchy, fertility, and wisdom. The ancient feminine-centered superstitions frequently depicted snakes as a symbol of wisdom and as women’s companions. Early fertility statues of fecund goddesses with voluptuous breasts and hips, often ripe with pregnancy, were replaced by a sadistic male god — the authors of Genesis wanted to supplant a pagan tradition that disgusted them. The sensual, fertile goddess was transformed into the instrument of death, shame, and “sin.” They punished her sexuality with pain and oppression.

The “original sin” was used by early church “doctors” as a vehicle for expressing their revulsion and disgust for women’s bodies. Saint Augustine wrote in the early 4th century regarding women, “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or in a mother; it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any other woman.”

Men like Augustine, Pope Innocent VIII, Martin Luther, John Calvin hated women and projected all guilt upon women, branding women as lustful weak-willed evil-doers who seduce men away from a divine male god — leading them astray from a virtuous path to salvation and immortality. The “original sin” enshrines the myth of feminine evil as justification for torturing, maiming, oppressing, and killing women.

The history of men’s attitudes towards women is a legacy of deep loathing with horrific consequences. The famous work, Malleus Maleficarum, was concocted by two neurotic celibate Dominican monks who were dispatched by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 to investigate and purge all “witchcraft.” The Malleus Maleficarum states that “all witchcraft comes from the carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable.” An entire chapter on how female sexuality destroys male sexuality is titled, “How, As It Were, They Deprive Man of His Virile Member.”

Medieval women were tortured and killed on charges of witchcraft for using herbs to mitigate excruciating labor pain, risk of death from hemorrhaging, and to treat painful destructive injuries to women’s genitals from childbirth.

The Church held that inordinate suffering (and even death) in childbirth was God’s punishment for Eve’s original sin. In the 19th century, clergymen influenced the law to criminalize the use of chloroform when it was introduced to ease women’s suffering during childbirth — on the grounds that providing any pain relief to birthing women was immoral and contradicted God’s word. This attitude remains prevalent across the US today — normalized with the excuse that pain relief for birthing mothers are bad for their babies.

Men’s seething hatred for women’s bodies extended far beyond a desire to inflict torture and cruelty on women during childbirth. It led to the criminalizing of contraceptives and abortion. Any expression of sexual desire by women was considered depraved, filthy, and corrupt. It pegged women as whores — the daughters of Eve.

Middle and upper class Victorian Age men used prostitutes (poor women without means of economic support) to satisfy their most debased sexual appetites while demanding purity of their wives. Middle and upper class women and girls who defied convention by daring to express their sexuality were diagnosed as “morally insane” and committed to barbaric mental institutions. Others were “cured” through FGM —clitoridectomy — by physicians. These same doctors held the view that menstruation was “dirty”, “dangerous” and a “curse inflicted because of Eve’s sin.”

When obstetrics and gynecology became formalized medical disciplines, medical doctors denounced women’s bodies and minds as defective. They used “scientific studies” to justify excluding women from higher education, political participation, and economic opportunity. The underlying woman-hating motif of the “original sin” is deeply interwoven throughout western society. It permeates our language, laws, medical practice, psychology, art, and literature.

In the English language, there are over 220 derogatory words for a sexually promiscuous female and only 20 (mostly complimentary) for a sexually promiscuous male. Our language promotes and reaffirms bias against women.

A “master” is a man with authority while a “mistress” is the kept woman (subject to her male lord). The word “sir” is a title denoting respect while “madam” refers to someone who runs a whorehouse. Even the word “woman” can be used as a pejorative to insult men. The words frequently used to describe female genitalia — “cunt”, “slit”, “crack”, “hole” — reflect centuries of sadistic male contempt for women’s bodies.

Even modern obstetrics treats women’s genitals with callous disregard and a seemingly brutal desire to inflict pain and injury on women. Women across North America are robbed of their dignity and need for autonomy and privacy during childbirth. They’re subjected to “routine procedures” against their will that are questionable, humiliating, and painful.

A birthing woman faces cold, sharp metal instruments being rudely shoved carelessly into her vagina by inconsiderate doctors. She is forced to endure unnecessary and painful episiotomies — her vulva is cut to speed delivery after which she is sutured up again, often with a “husband’s stitch” to make her “tight as a virgin” for her husband’s future sexual pleasure. Meanwhile her own is often severely damaged, or at least diminished by the pregnancy/childbirth experience.

Men have inherited centuries of fear, loathing, and ignorance of women’s sexuality and they feel justified in blaming women for male violence and injustice. Rape is still the only crime where the victim becomes the criminal. Conventional wisdom contends that female sexuality makes men lose self-control, abrogating men of any responsibility for their actions. Male dominated courts and legislatures feel justified in passing punitive laws denying women equal rights and most importantly, the right to have control and ownership of their own bodies.

Men are entitled to enjoy all the sex they want, women are not. Although pregnancy and childbirth pose serious risks of permanent damage to women’s health, wellbeing, bodies, and lives, the denial of a woman’s fundamental right to sexual expression without compulsory maternity is couched in the term “you should have kept your legs shut.”

Male responsibility for preventing dangerous and unwanted pregnancy is rarely, if ever, acknowledged or accepted in the US — the same country that has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the west, and in which a woman is raped every 3 minutes and battered by an intimate partner every 18 seconds.

Psychoanalysts suggest that the male ego is extremely fragile due to a fragile male gender identity. They say this is because little boys don’t identify with their mothers the way little girls do. As boys grow up, they’re taught to set women apart as “the Other” by resisting intimacy with women and treating women with contempt and violence. This is how men assert their own independent and fragile masculinity. But in distancing themselves from women over the sands of time by setting themselves up as superior, it must be humiliating and confusing to need and desire women so much. This leads one to conclude that heterosexual male desire is tormented and rife with conflict.

Making love to women can be both empowering and wonderful for a man while also making them uncomfortably vulnerable. During love-making, a woman can “bring out the soft, wild, naked baby in him.” [1]

This places men at risk of discovering the awesome power of feminine sexuality which contradicts and undermines their own social, political, economic, and physical power. Female nurturing has been promoted as the solution to male violence, but women have been the under-valued nurturers that society has taken for granted all along. It hasn’t stopped misogyny and male violence towards women. Germaine Greer once said that “women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”

Centuries of violent, sadistic, suppression of female sexuality by cruel and spiteful clergymen in league with ruthless elites give a good indication of the depth and degree of that hatred. Misogyny is a putrid boil on the face of humanity that has festered for centuries to the point where the deliberate infliction of torture and abuse aimed specifically at women has been normalized for a very long time.

It’s not a coincidence that this specious “pro-life” movement with its nefarious agenda of destroying women is 77% male, 100% of whom will never have to endure pregnancy and childbirth at peril to their own health, wellbeing, and lives. The only “life” they care about is the potential male fetus’s life. Girls don’t count, they’re disposable vaginal respirators. Women’s lives be damned. If women don’t like it, they should “keep their legs shut.”

In the wake of “Conscience Clause” laws and “fetal personhood” laws which have placed access to sterilization, reliable contraception, and abortion in the event of contraceptive failure out of reach for many American women, childbearing-aged women (from ages 10 – 55) get 2 choices: live in terror of unwanted pregnancies without any remedy, or be deprived of a healthy adult relationship and sexual intimacy. 80% of American women have no access to reliable contraception, including the option of sterilization or access to safe, legal early term abortion in the event of contraceptive failure.

Germaine Greer was right: the western manufactured re-packaged feminine sexuality is demeaning and contemptuous of women. It robs women of their natural rights and political autonomy. It inculcates a sense of shame and self-hatred in women about their own bodies. The result is powerlessness, imposing childbirth chattel slavery on women against their will, isolation, a diminished (or non-existent) sexuality, and often a complete deprivation of any joy that makes life worth living.

Nothing is more hateful and callous; nothing says “you’re of no consequence” more than forcing women into childbirth against their will, and then torturing them and degrading them during the birth process.

Being denied autonomy, privacy, respect, food, adequate pain relief, while being yelled at for being “weak” (and even slapped) for screaming from the flesh-ripping bloody agony that birth entails is all part and parcel for the childbirth experience in most US medical facilities.

Being humiliated by having to give birth without privacy, flat on your back, your legs spread-eagled degradingly on the delivery table with your business exposed for everybody to stare at (or even film) while heaping their personal value judgments on you like movie critics; having the most sensitive part of your womanhood probed, prodded and roughly pried open by impatient hands that are all too eager to pry/cut/tear the most sensitive part of your genitalia in a rush to greedily wrest the “prize” from your pain-wracked, bleeding, exhausted and battered body is proof of just how much women really are despised.

Once delivered, being left exposed without dignity, your legs still in stirrups, lying weak, exhausted and helpless in a pool of blood, feces, urine, vernix, meconium, and amniotic fluid — forgotten while everyone’s concern is solely for the fruit of your womb and not you — nothing says “you’re of no value” louder than that.

[1] “The Mermaid and the Minotaur”, Dorothy Dinnerstein (Harper and Row 1977)

Calling Out the Beneficiaries of Unearned Privilege On Their Classism

Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

I belong to several lists and message boards, and one of them is the Humanist List on Yahoo. It never ceases to amaze me as I read others’ posts how many middle class “liberals” look down their regal noses at the poor while claiming a moral high ground over their neocon counterparts who do the same thing. Whenever classism rears its ugly head, I call it out just like I would for racism and sexism.

One pro-Obama Democrat on the Humanist list, “Scotty”, a luckily employed medical professional who also happens to be a much older woman, had this to say regarding America’s poor and permanently economically excluded and the current austerity measures being imposed that will cause the deaths of millions of Americans struggling below poverty in post-welfare reform America:

“It’s a no brainer that people are going to want the rich to pay more rather than themselves. And I can certainly understand not wanting to create welfare parasites.  But I can’t understand the gleeful willingness of the right to let nearly 10% of this countries citizens fall into a pit because they can’t get jobs.”

Scotty

Fighting for social justice means confronting classism and calling people out who are class bigots. This was my response to “Scotty”:

You know Scotty, I really take umbrage to your classism and bigotry against the poor in your referring to this country’s least fortunate as “welfare parasites.” You want to call poor people names who got nothing but beat down into the ground and kept down all their life without ever getting a chance no matter how hard they tried? Here’s some food for thought:

This country, with the help of a lot of middle class voters, DID create a class of “welfare parasites” — the filthy stinking rich. And they did it WILLINGLY because they thought there was something in it for them in this “ownership society!” The middle class supported with their votes a neoliberal corporatist agenda these last 30 years which led us to this precipice.

The welfare parasites are the economic cannibal class on Wall Street — not the poor at the very bottom who had been economically excluded and kept down in a permanent underclass in a country where there NEVER was 100% full employment, NEVER enough living wage jobs to go around for everybody in need of a job.

About 400 government programs qualify as “entitlements.” Most of the recipients are in the middle and upper classes. Yet, middle and upper class people resent meager entitlements for the poor.

It is the middle and upper classes that have benefited the most from entitlements. Telecommunications, the Internet, and other technologies were all made possible through research and development that was funded by public tax dollars which provided the at-risk capital to for-profit privately owned companies that kept all the profits.

Many who have enjoyed good jobs had employers that got “welfare handouts” in terms of tax exclusions, tax credits, price supports, loan guarantees, payments in kind, export subsidies, subsidized insurance premiums, marketing services, irrigation and reclamation programs, “enterprise zone” tax-exempt real estate, and research and development grants — benefiting middle class members of the professional/managerial class by proxy.

When it comes to entitlement attitudes, middle and upper class people think they’re the only ones deserving of health care, educations, good jobs, and decent lives — claiming that nobody ever gave them anything, they “did it all on their own.” Did it on their own my ass.

There’s nothing as obtuse as the blindness of unearned privilege. A society that throws its poor, its excluded, and its discriminated against and marginalized to the wolves while guaranteeing wealth protection for the rich shields a lot of affluent people and corporations from having to compete in order to make money. This has had a deleterious effect on our economy, and on our society.

While middle class voters screech about “socialism” and called for the elimination of what few meager handouts existed for the poor, they conveniently ignored that socialist VA or FHA loan that helped them (or their parents) buy a nice house.

They forgot about that socialist GI Bill that opened doors of opportunity for their fathers that were not made available to poor women and minorities and poor non-veterans who also deserved a chance, and whose claims and needs in this society were equally valid.

They never mention the “handout” of a mortgage interest deduction that puts an average of $1,900 a year into the pockets of those lucky enough to have good jobs to able to afford to buy their own home.

Many were employed by the “Big Three” auto makers and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin which got billions in public “handouts” in the 1980′s and 1990′s, benefiting middle class employees by proxy.

They overlook how social security enables senior citizens to survive rather than forcing them to financially support their elderly parents.

In 1990, nearly one third of all veterans’ benefits went to households with incomes above $50,000, as did one fourth of all unemployment benefits, one third of all federal civil service retirement pensions, and one half of all military pensions. Meanwhile, only one fourth of federal entitlements went to those at the very bottom who were economically discarded and unable to sell their labor in the market— the poor.

Slightly more than half of all US households have at least one member who is receiving a direct entitlement benefit from the federal government in the form of federal civil service pensions, veterans’ disability benefits, and veterans’ pensions. These households will collect on average about $2.4 trillion by the end of 2010.

They complain about paying for poor kids’ subsidized school breakfasts and lunches, but they’re silent about everyone else’s taxes funding school choice vouchers for theirs.

"Classism For Dimwits" by Jacqueline S. Homan

They object to subsidized housing for the poor who are financially excluded from the housing market, but have no problem reaping the benefits from taxpayer-subsidized federal flood insurance for their beachfront homes that no private insurance company would insure. Former president George Herbert Walker Bush benefited enormously from the federal flood insurance program when his vacation home in Maine sustained approximately $400,000 in storm damage in 1991.

The “entitlement” or “welfare handout” that everyone ignores is the $250 billion dollar a year tax subsidy for employer-sponsored health insurance. This history of tying health insurance to employment goes back to World War II when the government enacted wage controls. Employers were competing for workers and began offering health insurance because they couldn’t offer higher wages than a competing employer. For some reason, this was not treated as taxable income to the employee.

Middle class people who stockpile money in Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSA’s) also get a line item tax deduction on their income taxes. So those who have their good jobs with health benefits and/or HSA’s are getting theirs at the expense of all citizens — including the poor who aren’t getting any access to medical, dental, and vision care.

The idea that someone’s misfortune stems from a lack of personal responsibility assumes that everyone has the same opportunities in life and that the poor squandered theirs. This is a common sentiment among right-wing middle and upper class white males that have always gotten everything by making damn sure that POOR women and minorities got nothing, while having the moxy to crow about how “they worked for it.”

Middle class Tea Partiers and “patriots” brandishing expensive assault rifles terrorized other citizens at Townhall meetings during the healthcare reform discourse, yelling that they refused to “pay for someone else’s” health care. Those who begrudge the “undeserving poor” access to health care because they don’t want to “pay for someone else” are getting subsidized while depriving the poor by refusing to extend that subsidy to everyone in the name of “freedom.” Freedom to starve or freeze to death, or become disabled or die from being unable to afford medical care is no freedom at all. The backlash against real healthcare reform was never about “freedom.” It’s really about a false sense of superiority and classism.

Belligerent middle and upper class spoiled brats denouncing “socialism” and “welfare handouts” for the poor have benefited far more from “socialism” than the poor ever have. And not one tantrum-throwing “self-made man” squawking about entitlements for the poor is willing to give their middle class job to someone in poverty that never got a chance so they could have a good job, thus reducing the number of those on the public dole whom they denigrate as “welfare parasites.”

Corporate executives feel entitled to the tens of millions of dollars in salaries, stocks, and “golden parachutes” even if they steal from their companies and cause a national, or even a global, economic collapse. Poor people who kite checks to buy food or rob a 7-Eleven go to prison. CEOs get rich; poor people get the stinky finger.

Banksters and Wall Street crooks walked away with fortunes during the 1980′s S & L scandal while the taxpayers paid the $500 billion dollar bailout tab. Thanks to Reagan’s deregulation of the S & L industry, S & L’s were allowed to take any investment risk they wanted with depositors’ money with the understanding that any failures or bad debts would be subsidized by the public. 90% of those who were depositors had accounts worth more than $100,000.

US companies got $1 billion from the public dole through USAID from 1985 – 1995 to pay for shipping US jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets. USAID provided low-interest loans, tax exemptions, travel and training funds, advertising, and “black lists” to weed out union sympathizers and organizers in other countries.

In 1995, over 40% of USDA subsidies and farm payments went to farmers with a net worth in excess of $750,000. Meanwhile, those of us on food stamps and/or WIC are begrudged nutritious food.

While Congress held hearings on “welfare dependency” and the impact of the “culture of poverty” on unjustly enriched “welfare queens”, no hearings were held on the middle and upper class entitlement mentality regarding all the handouts they benefit from.

Do you have a 401(k)? If any of your portfolio’s holdings include bank instruments, municipal bonds, Ginnie Mae’s, or CD’s, you’re being enriched directly as the result of entitlement programs that have supported and bailed out those “malefactors of great wealth” that are privately owned. “Self-made” members of the investor class did not get theirs on their own. They got it off the backs of everyone else.

Any appreciation in your retirement portfolio’s value from capital gains and increased dividend payouts on stocks came directly as a result of corporations realizing huge profits by “cutting costs” — a euphemism for slashing wages, benefits and permanently eliminating jobs.

Those most likely to suffer from job loss, reduced wages and lost benefits are workers over age 40, who have been rendered permanently unemployable and have fallen into poverty after long-term joblessness due to age, gender, race, looks, and socio-economic class discrimination. Did you snipe at them for being on food stamps because you “worked for everything you got?”

Newsflash for the middle class: You didn’t “earn” that wealth in your 401(k) or other stock portfolio. You got it at the expense of others’ loss.

Have you thanked capitalism’s “losers” for your economic success? No need for accolades, just support the restoration of something resembling a real safety net for those at the very bottom who got the least in terms of opportunity and societal benefits in “free enterprise” America — and whose exclusion ensured your place on the socio-economic ladder.

Middle class voters were silent about welfare for the rich while they elected politicians who slashed meager subsistence benefits and other social programs that helped the poor. They cried foul about preferential jobs placement programs for the disadvantaged under CETA and Affirmative Action while they benefited from the biggest preferential job placement program of their own: middle class “good ole boy” nepotism.

The middle class supported Welfare Reform because they wanted to force poor women with children to get jobs, so long as it wasn’t their middle class jobs.

The rich, who clamored for “free market” capitalism in a competitive society, resorted to calling upon government to enrich them through tariffs, public subsidies, land grants, government contracts, and other “welfare handouts.”

But hey, the poor mother raising a child or two without getting a goddamn dime in child support from the co-conceiver isn’t doing anything (because we all know that caretaking, raising the future generation, and homemaking isn’t “real” work, right?) while some guy day-trading stocks or speculating on commodities, spending a couple hours a day on his laptop flipping securities “earned” his wealth because THAT is somehow “real” work while what POOR WOMEN do is not.

We Are Not All in the Same Boat

Jacqueline S. Homan

We are not “all in this together.”

The rich, who used their middle class phalanx of clergymen, police, lawyers, judges, and doctors to keep the poor “in their place” found religion, “self-help” books, and psychotherapy to be particularly useful in managing, controlling, and socially engineering the poor into meek acceptance of their miserable lot in life — a life of nothing but deprivation, suffering and want seasoned with more than just a modicum of scorn and contempt generously doled out by the middle class.

The middle class always sided with the rich. They have always been eager Brownshirts, brown-nosing the rich while claiming to hate them as they cheerfully stepped on the necks of the poor with their spit-shined jackboots, grinding our faces into the dirt. In times of great economic calamity, the middle classes say to the poor, “we’re all in the same boat” and “we’re all in this together.”

No, we are not.

The middle classes have always used the poor to get some measure of comfort and relief for themselves while telling those in the most need that after they got theirs, they will help us get ours. But they never have. They always abandon us as soon as their needs are met. How quickly they forget about that unity and spirit about all of us being “in this together” once they’ve conveniently gotten their needs addressed — always at the expense of ours.

Poor women are subjected to compulsory childbirth (without access to decent medical and dental care during pregnancy when it is most needed), and are deprived of having any ownership and control over our own bodies. With 87% of all US counties lacking an abortion provider and having diminished access to reliable contraception for poor women, including emergency contraception, poor women are de facto reproductive chattel slaves whose human rights, needs and feelings count less than that of a parasitically attached embryo/fetus. Are men “in the same boat?” No. Are middle class women who can afford their birth control and money to travel to access abortion in the event of contraceptive failure “in the same boat?” No. Are middle class women forced to gestate their rapists’ progeny? No. We are not “all in the same boat.”

Up until the economic collapse of 2008, the middle class ignored the poor as if we didn’t exist; much less have a right to live. For them to tell the poor whom they’ve kept down all these years that “we’re all in this together” and that “we’re all in the same boat” is beyond hypocritical.

If you were one of those whose votes, cultural capital, campaign contributions, election volunteering activities placed the last three decades of neoliberals and neocons in office that have deprived poor women of bodily autonomy and bodily integrity in the name of “pro-life” morality and then gutted what miserly inadequate safety nets for the poor that used to exist; while being a card-carrying member of the very class that refused to provide the poor (especially the poor women thrown off of welfare) with a guaranteed right to health care and a living wage job — we are not “all in this together.”

If you were middle class, you were one of the experts, gatekeepers, overseers, taskmasters, or policymakers that made damn sure that the credentialism you’ve imposed and other more superficial qualifiers (having the “right” image) kept the poor on society’s margins with nothing, not even an equal chance.

You are not “in this together” with those of us whom you’ve oppressed, making sure that as a poor woman I couldn’t get anything I needed throughout most of my 43 years of life in this country — a nation founded on gender inferiority, racism, and exploitation; a society that I did not ask to be born in.

If you have all your natural teeth and have enjoyed access to health and dental care over the past 30 years while I and many others in poverty did not; you are not “in the same boat” as those of us who never got to make it out of poverty and never had any of those things. Our health and quality of life is far more degraded and miserable as a result — thanks to your policies of Benign Neglect, like Welfare Deform.

Don’t you dare insult the intelligence of all the poor whom you’ve begrudged nutritious food, good jobs, decent housing, advanced educations, health and dental care, and an economic lifeline of a hand up these past 30 years just so you could “get yours” — while you put us down, belittled us, slammed the doors of opportunity shut in our faces, and then told us that if we weren’t making it in the “land of opportunity” it was our fault for not being able to compete.

Don’t you dare tell us how you suddenly care since you’re poor and jobless now and therefore “in the same boat” as us after telling us that we’ve got it made compared to people in other countries and that we should “learn how to help ourselves” and “stop bitching” because you didn’t want to hear about our problems when we had nothing while you had everything.

You were not “in this together” with those of us in poverty before, and we’re not “all in this together” now.

It’s easier to believe in leprechauns and unicorns than in your proclaimed sincerity. You think you can tell us that you now want to join hands and sing Koom Bye Ya after 30 years of promoting policies that disenfranchised us, criminalized us, and made us invisible, that “we’re all in this together now” and that the underclass should just “forgive and forget” about all the harm you’ve caused for us. Sorry, but there are some things — a long sordid history of things — that there is no “just getting over it.”

You have not earned our support and trust. And you don’t deserve our cooperation in what really amounts to making sure your middle class lives are as comfortable as possible within the status quo of the capitalist paradigm which caused all the problems this nation and the world faces today. Your track record speaks for itself — it was always the poor whose needs you jettisoned after getting what you wanted from an oppressive capitalist system of unearned privileges that still denies equal rights to women, with women in poverty suffering the worst because of it. Your legacy is one of betrayal, hypocrisy, and deceit.

If we are really “all in this together”, if the middle class ever really gave a crap about any goddam social justice at all, the middle class wouldn’t act like glory hounds auditioning for Jesus while patronizing the poor as if we’re stupid and “uneducated” (after making damn sure we couldn’t get the educations that you got).

If the middle class had any real concept of “fairness”, they would not have erected and maintained barriers to health care for the poor and access to educations and good jobs while strutting like peacocks and throwing their status around like sanctimonious know-it-all fucks whose shit doesn’t stink.

The middle class heaped abuse, scorn, ridicule, and condescension on everyone in the underclass while convincing themselves that they were so much better than those of us struggling in deep poverty who never got a chance for anything, no matter how hard we tried in a nation that is nothing but one great big public toilet of narcissistic materialism — that the middle class created while thinking they were so above it all.

Newsflash: The owning class isn’t all that into you.

I am not interested in supporting any political platform within the capitalist paradigm. I do not consent to maintaining any vestiges of a system of unearned privileges. Non Serviam (I will not serve).

Capitalism’s Legacy, the Auschwitz of Palestine and the Attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla

Jacqueline S. Homan, Author: "Classism For Dimwits", "Nothing You Can Possess", "Eyes of a Monster," and "Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie"

Israel’s government claims its military was defending Israel against “terrorists” aboard the Freedom Flotilla that was bound for Gaza with humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees in Gaza. The coalition of international human rights volunteers had no guns. The IDF was heavily armed.

Israel controls all entry points to Palestinian territory in Gaza — which is not part of Israel — essentially blocking access to Palestine. Journalists, doctors, students, and humanitarian aid volunteers have all been denied access to Gaza. The Palestinians who struggle to subsist there are locked in. They cannot leave except through points of entry and exit controlled by Israel — including by sea. They languish in destitution.

Their homes and infrastructure destroyed by IDF bulldozers, tanks, and heavy artillery, Palestinians have no means of building their own viable society. They are denied the means to provide for themselves the most basic of human needs. One and a half million people are living there in the largest open-air concentration camp in the world.

Israel deploys well-heeled, well-armed military forces against a trapped and defenseless civilian population in Palestine, deliberately keeping Palestinians from being able to build and sustain viable life. Israel controls everything that enters or exits Palestine by air, land, and sea. Not just the ingress and egress of people; but medical equipment, food, building supplies, textiles, children’s toys, and school supplies. It’s not about defense against “terrorism”, or about Israel’s “right to exist.” It’s about a vicious form of capitalism known as colonialism. Consider:

All of humanity can be divided into three groups — A, B, and C. Group A is made up of those who live primarily off of stock dividends, interest payments on their bond investments, royalties on their land and mineral rights, inherited money, and rents for their real estate. In other words, Group A derives its livelihood from passive or unearned income generated from the capital it owns.  Groups B and C comprise the remaining 99% of humanity. Group B lives primarily off of wages, salaries, tips, commissions, fees or pensions. Group C are those remaining billions of people across the world who don’t even get that — they live hand-to-mouth on whatever crumbs they can scrounge.

Group A obtains wealth by imperialist or colonialist measures by deracination— driving the people off of the land either by genocide, incarceration, or other means of expulsion, and de-skilling and disenfranchising the remainder by forcing them to work for subsistence wages out of lack of options. Group A can also be called the “Owning Class” since they own most of the world’s resources and means of production. Group A also owns a lot of the government or the state.

Group A has very politically active elements that make careers out of protecting the interests of Group A. Those politically active members of Group A become presidents, parliamentarians, prime ministers, Congressmen, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of the US Department of Defense, CIA directors, Joint Chiefs of Staff, FBI directors, military intelligence, etc., whose function is to keep the world safe for the Fortune 500 companies — the people in Group A — so that they can extract the value from the natural resources and exploit the surplus value from the labor of Group B, and squash any populist uprising.

In order to deracinate Palestine — including Gaza, the West Bank, and Arab communities within Israel itself — Israeli military operations have damaged infrastructure and the Israeli government crafted a list of forbidden goods that cannot be delivered by humanitarian organizations to the Palestinians which have absolutely nothing to do with Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism. Instead, it has everything to do with ethnic cleansing and genocide with land expropriation as the motive.

Imperialist governments of the West have long defended Israel’s right to exist. Since its artificial creation by European and American heads of state in 1948, Israel has only allowed its indigenous Arab peoples — the Palestinians — the right to barely subsist. Power and privilege are a dangerous narcotic; more potent and addictive than any opiate. Violence used to protect privilege destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, and it consumes those who use it to become masters of the universe.

Israel uses sophisticated aircraft and navy vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums. To attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no army, and no artillery units, no mechanized army or command to control — and calling this “war”  — seems ludicrous. But in a sense, it is a war — a class war.  It’s class genocide. For its victims, capitalism is cruelty; not freedom.

Israel speaks to Palestinians in the language of intimidation, contempt, and death.

Those who orchestrate such aggression do not understand the insatiable rage born of long-standing policies of humiliation, violence, and human rights violations. A mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget.

A child that witnesses his sick or injured grandmother dying while being detained at an Israeli check point does not forget.

Pregnant women denied access to hospitals who suffer permanently maiming injuries from difficult labors and births; and who are stripped of their dignity by being forced to give birth in front of a hostile audience of gawking, lewd, racist soldiers that harass them in their most vulnerable state — peering between their legs while pointing a loaded gun at them — do not forget.

Parents who carry their child’s broken body to a bombed out hospital do not forget.

These crimes against humanity are engraved forever upon their memory. They sear the psyche and become like a virus in those who survive. Is it any wonder that 71% of Palestinian children interviewed in Gaza recently said that they wanted to be a suicide bomber?

The collective refusal of our government, our media, and our scholars to speak out in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our shambolic espousal of “freedom” and “democracy.”

The blind acceptance of Israel’s pogroms against Palestinians cloaked under the pretense of Israel’s “right to exist” contradicts reason as the images of the victims of Israeli policy seep out from behind the sealed ghetto of Gaza before the world’s eyes. It is a betrayal of the memory of all those killed in other genocides in other times and in other lands.

The lesson of the Holocaust was not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and fail to do so — regardless of who carries it out and who is targeted — you are culpable. And certain US government leaders, lawmakers, and multinational corporations are very culpable. The F-16 fighter jets, the Apache helicopters, and the 250 lb smart GPU-39 bombs are all part of the multi-billion dollar annual military aid package that the US gives Israel.

Dispossessed and disenfranchised children trapped win the world’s largest open-air gulag are being killed right now with US-made weapons. The American public’s indifference to this suffering and injustice should come as no surprise as capitalism’s architecture of aggression led us to go along with the program of killing even more women and children on a grander scale in Iraq and Afghanistan — so much so that Afghan women and girls who were atrociously oppressed under the Taliban are now fleeing in terror of their “liberators” — into the arms of Taliban mujahedeen.

From December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009, Israel launched a brutal attack on 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. On March 9, 2010, a group gathered near the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York and began reading from the Goldstone report; the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict. Afterwards, hundreds of human rights activists and concerned citizens formed a single file procession to carry the evidence revealed in the report to the Waldorf Astoria where a gala was organized by the Friends of the IDF to honor Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli commander-in-chief of the military forces during Operation Cast Lead — the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. Over 1,400 Palestinians were killed by Operation Cast Lead alone.

This operation entailed the IDF’s use of depleted uranium weapons against the civilian population of Gaza, resulting in loss of sight and limb amputations. Cluster bombs and depleted uranium usage is prohibited under the Geneva Convention and international law. Yet, the very ones responsible for these crimes against humanity were honored at a $1000/plate dinner at the Waldorf Astoria — raising $20 million for the IDF through a US tax-exempt organization, “Friends of the IDF.” We are judged by the company we keep.  We should beware of what sort of “friends” we choose.

One of the authors of the Goldstone report, Colonel Desmond Travers, was interviewed by Rory McCarthy of the UK Guardian. Travers said that the IDF attacks were “intentional and precise and carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population. Gaza is the only gulag in the Western hemisphere; maintained by democracies, closed off from food, water, and air.”

Although both sides of the conflict are culpable, the degree of Israel’s culpability was far greater because of the extreme power differential. Travers said IDF tactics included “hostage-taking, felling of homes, destruction of the judicial police infrastructure, destruction of hospitals and medical infrastructure, destruction of the agricultural, water, and sewage infrastructure.”

Israel claimed this massacre was an “error.” The orchestrated mechanized maiming and killing of civilians; the deliberate targeting of schools, hospitals, homes, and mosques is not something that happens by accident.

Israel claimed that mosques and schools were frequently used to store caches of weapons. But the UN mission found no such evidence of that. Travers says those claims are part and parcel of a negative propaganda campaign that stereotypes Palestinians (and Arabs in general) and such prejudicial unfounded claims would never withstand criticism by the world community if leveled against any other group.

“During the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland, if a British public figure or military official had said, ‘Catholic churches were warehouses for Semtex’ there would have been an international outcry, especially in the Catholic world over such a slur.” ~ Colonel Desmond Travers

But the Catholic world enjoys something that Palestinians do not: enormous wealth and centuries of unearned privilege. The Vatican is the world’s oldest imperialist multinational corporation. Privilege insulates its beneficiaries from the consequences it poses to others. Privilege is the central ingredient in imbalanced and unequal relationships. Capitalism and all of its varying forms — imperialism, fascism, feudalism, and colonialism —  require imbalanced and unequal relationships in order to thrive.

Capitalism is an architecture of aggression built upon the exploitation, disenfranchisement, coercion, intimidation, and dehumanization of others.

When you can see that a group is female, disabled, old, or a different race, that makes it easier to target and oppress them. Thus, capitalism’s “winners” get what they’ve got unfairly and protect their gains by breaking the backs of their victims — namely, those who dare to defy capitalism’s injustices of discrimination and the social damage inflicted by expropriation and the crushing of capitalism’s victims on a playing field that is anything but level.

If capitalism’s “losers” get restive, they are swiftly reminded of “their place.” They’re harshly pressed back in line and their backs crushed — their hopes, dreams, and aspirations for a chance in life bulldozed and run over — like 23 year old Rachel Corrie, the unarmed peace activist deliberately hewn down by an IDF-driven Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer on March 16, 2003 in Gaza. The cold-blooded murder of a 23 year old American college student was no more of an accident than colonialism — or any other form of capitalism — is. To believe otherwise is to believe there is capitalism without capitalists, imperialism without imperialists, fascism without fascists, and colonialism without colonists.

You don’t have colonialism without colonists, capitalism without capitalists, or imperialism without imperialists.

These things don’t just happen in a vacuum. Left to their own devices, they devour themselves after consuming their hosts. Only the rule of law and a strong enough collective backbone of can prevent the social destruction and collateral damage left in capitalism’s wake. And international justice needs a spine of our collective human solidarity that is too strong to be crushed by tyranny, bribery, divisiveness and intimidation and to oppose death squads, slave labor, torture, artificially created poverty by capitalist disinvestment, armored bulldozers and all of the ideologies that promote discrimination and the dehumanization of others.

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