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.

Tokophobia is the Latest Buzzword in Malespeak

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

Tokophobia. This is the newest trendy buzzword in male-speak for the day which paints women’s aversion to pregnancy and childbirth as a “disorder” — as if “normal” women should all want to go through it no matter how painful it is and what it does to our psyches and bodies.

Why is it that MEN who have aversion to being in the delivery room with their impregnated bed victims, and who are not keen on parenthood exempted from being labeled with any kind of disorder? This is yet one more disgusting use of male privilege as a cudgel to beat women into patriarchal conformity and submission to men.

I never had kids because I did NOT want to go through pregnancy and childbirth, period. What I saw I did NOT like, and too many women who were conned into the mommy trap have shared in the deepest of secrecy that they regret going through it and hate being mothers but cannot say so in our male supremacist society.

I am NOT “tokophobic.” I just didn’t want all the body policing that goes with childbearing on top of the risks, permanent negative side effects and all the physical consequences of pregnancy that are NOT  “beautiful” in addition to the economic roulette wheel that is part and parcel of the motherhood experience in this patriarchal shithole of a country.

I just don’t/never did want my body torn asunder inside out during the process of gestating and birthing some ungrateful prick’s genetic “legacy” only to possibly end up abandoned, discarded, denied employment (due to lingering childbearing-related health problems like incontinence, obesity, etc.), made to feel like shit over a ruined body (“having a baby is no excuse for letting yourself go”, etc.), and being denied adequate economic support (thanks to Welfare Reform) in this society — never mind reasonable compensation for the pain, suffering, trauma, disfigurement and very real losses in both economic and physical terms that goes with the whole ordeal of childbearing.

Having a baby is just not worth it. Call me selfish, I don’t give a fuck. It’s MY body. Since I’m a poor woman with nothing else in this shit-filled world that I can truly call my own EXCEPT my body, I’ll be damned of ANYONE is going to take even that away from me for some (male-dictated) “moral imperative.” I didn’t want to go through it 20 years ago and today at age 45, I feel the same way, but our paternalistic male-dominated medical constabulary REFUSED to give me a tubal ligation on demand when I was younger while I still had the (albeit limited) earning opportunities and funds to afford the procedure.

My whole life was fraught with anxiety beginning with puberty because of being forced against my will into vulnerability to pregnancy — something I did not ever want to go through. I have never wavered in my position and have no regrets about passing on the miserable, pain-wracked and blood-filled anxiety fest that pregnancy and childbirth really is.

Living under patriarchy where the ONLY way women can get ANY job at all is if we’re sufficiently young enough and physically attractive and thin enough (according to male-defined standards), a body ruined by childbirth is NOT a shallow, vain, or superficial concern — not when women’s economic survival is at stake. Without just compensation for the pain, the trauma, and the disfigurement of childbearing, on top of the very real risk of permanent disability or even death as a result of childbirth, it is NOT worth it for most women to have kids. Men have made it so.

Look at how many affluent men callously discard their ‘brood mares’ for younger, trimmer, thinner women whose bodies haven’t been ruined from pregnancy when childbirth leaves the wife’s body as “damaged goods”, unable to conform to trophy fuck-toy expectations. And what do discarded women get out of the deal? We get denied good jobs, denied child support, denied alimony, denied even enough of subsistence from welfare to live on and told that we’re “leeches who aren’t contributing to society.”

Men are not happy unless they’re making sure that women’s lives are made a living hell. If that were not so, then most men would not be so goddamn selfish as to refuse to wear a “jimmy hat” for women who don’t want to get pregnant.  Or if men were not too damn selfish to get a vasectomy and freeze their sperm instead of presuming that they have a right to deposit their excreta inside women’s bodies as a unilateral contract of “consent” and condition of sex. This is the “consideration” and “respect” for our needs and feelings we women get from men — women whose bodies that men feel entitled to “have” for their use and pleasure and rarely, if ever, ours.

Patriarchal ideologies permeating this society hold that women who give of themselves sexually to men (even under duress and coercion) to satisfy male “needs” are “sluts” that deserve to be raped and deserve to be punished with the torture of forced childbirth through “pro-life” laws and public policies that result in women being denied access to abortion and reliable contraceptives that women can use and control — rather than have to beg and plead and fight with men to wear condoms (without poking holes in them deliberately to impregnate women as a form of abuse, manipulation and control, which many men do).

Women who opt out of having sex with men because of not wanting to be impregnated are derided as “prudes” or castigated for being “lezzies” and “dykes” (what’s wrong with being a lesbian anyway?).

No way in hell should the “responsibility” of motherhood be imposed through the violence of male-supremacist laws on ALL women, whether we want to go through it or not, as punishment for having sex — for meeting men’s sexual “needs” and gratification while our own are rarely, if ever, met — without hazard pay on top of a full salary plus a guaranteed livable pension for the very real work and sacrifice that motherhood is!

Even if adequate compensation DID get enacted for childbearing, maternity is a tour of duty that should NEVER be forced. We don’t force men to join the military and compel them to serve in combat without pay (plus they get all kinds of benefits and extra advantages in the job market after completing their tour of duty, which is a hell of a lot shorter than 18+ years!).

Given the War on Women and how many “good guys” have shown their true colors by defending, excusing, and justifying patriarchy, lesbianism is starting to look like a much more attractive alternative. My “sole purpose” for living is NOT to be some selfish, ungrateful bastard’s brood mare and disposable fetus container, or some “Shallow Hal’s” penis sheath and sperm receptacle, thank you very much!

Call It What It Is — MALE Violence Against Women

by Elaine Charkowski

If you like this article, please post and share it with at least three women and it will go viral!

Breaking the silence by naming an atrocity — and its perpetrators — is the first step toward ending it. Patriarchy is a 6,000 year-old, male-supremacist social system. To maintain it, “Women’s agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable and the jig would be up,” said Sonia Johnson in “Telling the Truth,” which is chapter 10 of her book Going Out of Our Minds-The Metaphysics of Liberation.

MALE violence against women must be named specifically in order to isolate it so it can be eradicated. Women, who outnumber men, are the single largest group of oppressed humans on the planet. Men have oppressed women nonstop for the longest length of time of any oppressed group, roughly 6,000 years (The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler).

A young woman once told me that dealing with male violence “was just part of being a woman!” However, it’s the moral responsibility of the group holding the most power to keep its members from oppressing people in groups holding less power. Thus, ALL men are responsible for stopping male violence against women. Violent men must stop assaulting women. Non-violent men must not sit by and allow male violence against women to continue. To do so is to condone it. Their inaction-or indifference-is passive male violence against women.
Silence is complicity.

Here are nine of the most popular evasions often used to avoid naming MALE violence specifically and to avoid holding ALL men responsible for ending male violence against women:

1. “Not all men are violent.”
No one said they were. Since men collectively hold more power than women, and since all men benefit from living in a sexist, male supremacist society, non-violent men are also responsible for stopping male violence against women. In the same way, whites, who collectively hold more power than people of color (in the U.S.) are responsible for ending racism, even whites who don’t commit racist acts. This is because all whites benefit from living in a racist society that gives whites unearned advantages.

2. “Women are violent too.”
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Mary Daly calls this “universalism.” Muddying the waters, it blurs the specific focus on male violence against women by blending it with violence in general (universal violence) and casting it as a gender-neutral human issue (see examples of universalism in excuse #3 below).

Also, under patriarchy, women are blamed for their own degradation (being violent, collaborating with men against women, etc.) As Mary Daly wrote in her book  Pure Lust, (p.365) “Within the Virulent State of phallocracy, women have been attacked and divided against our Selves. From the earliest times of the patriarchy, countless mothers have been broken and the resulting broken daughters have carried on the chain of fragmentation. . . .

“They have been reduced to responding to the fettered/fathered urge to reproduce their altered–(that is, patriarchally identified selves)– in an endless circle of Self destruction. Such forcibly altered women have appeared to be normal within the man made milieu.”

Although it exists, female violence pales in comparison to male violence. Men commit 88 percent of violent crime (US Bureau of Justice statistics). Women don’t build rape camps to torture and molest men to death. Women don’t control the U.S. government which spends more than half a trillion dollars a year on mass murder (war). Globally, women can’t walk alone without the possibility of men assaulting them. The reverse is not true. Even though some broken token women may collaborate with patriarchal men to gain power (Condi Rice, Margaret Thatcher etc.) it doesn’t change the fact that patriarchal men are in charge and allow selected token “honorary men” into the boys club–if they identify with, and behave like, patriarchal men.

3. “Since violence is a human problem committed by both sexes, and since women also commit violence against women, MALE violence against women doesn’t have to be isolated and named specifically.”

Here are some examples of universalism (“women are violent too” etc.) The power disparity between women and men is the reason for some women’s dysfunctional behavior. It is not an excuse for it:

• “Some lesbians also better their partners”
This results from internalized dysfunctional heterosexual behavior absorbed from a patriarchal society in which the dominating partner (the man) batters the woman. Male violence against women is the blueprint for lesbian vs lesbian battering.

•“Some women also commit racist violence against women”
Racism (male violence based on race) was created and implemented by dysfunctional men to “divide and conquer.” Male violence based on the “otherness” of the oppressed is the blueprint for racist attacks inflicted by some women upon “other” women. This results when women internalize racism and identify with the dominating race (including men)-instead of bonding with oppressed women. Racism is only possible when inflicted by the race possessing the most political and economic power (racism=prejudice+power over). Thus, women of dominated races cannot commit racism against women of the dominating race-only prejudice. Male violence against women of the same race is clearly seen as sexism. However, male violence against women of different races is often obscured by being seen as just racism instead of racism and sexism.

•“Some women also exploit women sexually and economically.”
Hatred and contempt of women-including themselves-is the underlying issue. Women who exploit other women identify with and see themselves through the eyes of the oppressor (male supremacists who have contempt for women).

4. The absent referent.
The “absent referent” refers to something without naming it. Mary Daly in her book “Quintessence” wrote, “Naming the agent is required for an adequate analysis of atrocities.” As linguist Julia Penelope has shown in her book, “Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues,” “agent deletion is a dangerous and common mind-muddying flaw.” Agent deletion is common, concerning male violence against women. Timid terms such as “sexual violence,” “domestic violence” “gender-based violence,” and “violence” refer to men without naming them, even when describing instances when it was obviously men who raped hundreds of thousands of women in Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda and many other nations. Even Amnesty International, which calls it “a global scourge,” uses the term “violence against women” and “sexual violence” instead of “male violence against women.”

5. “Men also rape men and boys.”
Rape is a male hate crime against women. However, the use of universalism (see #3) attempts to portray rape as a gender-neutral atrocity. The fact that men also rape men and boys doesn’t change the fact that in every nation on earth, in all levels of society, men rape women. Even when men rape males, contempt for women is the underlying issue. Men rape males to degrade them by treating them like raped women.

If white supremacist men batter or murder a black man, it’s clearly seen as a racist hate crime, even though white man also batter white men. In the same manner, rape is a hate crime against women, even though men also rape men.

6. “What we resist persists.”
Supposedly, opposing something directly “gives it more power.” If racism and sexism were not opposed directly in the U.S., black people would still be enslaved. Women would still be men’s property, unable to vote, own a business or keep their own wages. If the Nazis were not opposed directly, they would now run the world.
Opposing women’s oppression directly is only one tactic. Another is being proactive by supporting women in their efforts to gain universal human rights. This can be done by volunteering at women’s shelters, donating to groups that help women in impoverished nations and many other ways. Both tactics are necessary.

7. The “passive voice.”
In English grammar, using the passive voice (women were raped by men) instead of the active voice (men raped the women) shifts the focus from the perpetrators and their actions (men doing the raping) to their victims (the women being raped).

8. “Boys will be boys.”
Patriarchal cultures promote “nature over nurture” (biological determinism) and claim men are “naturally violent.” This legitimizes and perpetuates war and men’s abuse of women. Abnormal violent “manhood” is regarded as the norm. However, men are naturally peaceful. Archaeological evidence shows men enjoyed and maintained 1,500 years of peace in ancient Crete! It’s proven today by famous non-violent men such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other men who organize against warfare and who speak out against male violence against women. It takes years of traumatic conditioning (while being immersed in a violent society) to make men violent. “Military training camps, police academies and even some self-defense pros are constantly searching for more effective methods of suppressing the human revulsion to taking human life.” – See “The Science of Creating Killers”
If men were “naturally violent,” years of brutal conditioning by violent media and in boot camps would not be needed.

9. “Societies were always patriarchal and men have always dominated women.”
Thousands of years of women’s history has been nearly erased by patriarchal men. Marija Gimbutas, the world renowned archaeologist who wrote Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe unearthed many relics from around the world that proves men didn’t always dominate women and that women and men once shared power in peaceful non-patriarchal Goddess worshipping. societies. Riane Eisler’s book The Chalice and the Blade cites many more instances proving this.

“Democracy does not yet exist anywhere”

Robin Morgan wrote The Demon Lover which is a study of the link between terrorism in the home (“domestic violence” or more accurately, MALE violence against women in the home) and global terrorism. Terrorism, (MALE violence against women) both in the home and in ALL the societies of the world, supports patriarchy and is a necessary component.

Morgan said, “The majority of the population in virtually all nation states is female and is forced by patriarchy to obey, be silent, and acquiesce-which means that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist anywhere.”

The necessary foundation for the creation of democracy is universal human rights for women. This cannot be achieved unless global MALE violence against women is eradicated. The question is how can we accomplish this? Men have had more than 6,000 to stop their endless war against women, and they haven’t stopped. So it falls to women to accomplish this.

From The Ship that sailed into the Living Room by Sonia Johnson:

“My formative years were spent during men’s so-called Second World War. From that war and from reading since, I learned some of the tactics that had had to be invented to prevent the escape of prisoners.

Generally, when a group of men was captured, as soon as possible the captors got them into some sort of holding corral—some cordoned-off space—and set guards to watch them.

“Among the prisoners, leaders would soon arise, those men who might, for instance, urge others around them not to cooperate with the enemy until they were all given water. In some way, those who were less afraid, surer of themselves, and therefore most likely to organize rebellions or escapes, soon identified themselves.

“Their captors discovered through trial and error that to prevent trouble they had either to execute these leaders immediately or to put them in solitary confinement—one man to one cell with his own private guard. The analogy is obvious.

“When men dreamed of controlling women and hence the world, every woman was just such a leader—one of those who would disrupt and defeat the hell-plans. So during the war men have fought against us for thousands of years, they have had either to kill us or to put us in solitary confinement—one woman to one guard in one cell . . . .”

There has been only ONE war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men’s all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.

UPDATE: All is Not Well In Viagraland

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

Well, since my previous post concerning the problems of rampant misogyny and sexism in the atheist/skeptics community, which has really become more of a haven for MRA’s/PUA’s and their misogynist male chauvinist fellow travelers, I received only one follow-up email from JREF’s Communications Director, Carrie Poppy the same day as the original post went up.

Thank you for your questions, Jacqueline.

Could you provide your deadline and outlet? Thanks so much.

Best,

Carrie Poppy

Director of Communications, James Randi Educational Foundation

www.randi.org

            (213) 293-3092       ext. 2  |              (703) 226-3785       fax

From: Jacqueline Homan <jacquelinehoman7@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:05 PM
Subject: These are my specific questions
To: djgrothe@randi.org
Cc: Carrie@randi.org

To which I immediately responded:

My deadline is three business days. And as to “outlet”, I believe I made it perfectly clear to DJ Grothe that I am unembedded, therefore you may submit your responses to me in the same fashion in which I asked the questions: by email.

As of midnight, June 26 2012, I have not received ANY further response. To the best of my knowledge, neither have the others who have also been inquiring.

This is not an accident or an ‘unfortunate miscommunication.’ There is something to be said when valid questions go ignored about women being threatened, harassed, and retaliated against for complaining that atheist/skeptics conferences more closely resemble Nerd Boys Gone Wild with “enlightened” men exhibiting frat boy mentalities. The Vatican and the Christian Right are not the only patriarchal powerhouses with a vested interest in perpetuating misogyny, male privilege, sexism, and discrimination against women and girls. The “freethought” community needs to own up to that and stop blaming misogyny on religion when religion has merely been one of the vehicles that legitimized it.

The dead giveaway was the conspicuous absence of all these “reasonable” men in the fight against the War on Women. Not a single loud-mouthed atheist/skeptic pontificating know-it-all gasbag male from this colossal fart convention could be found among most states’ Unite Against the War on Women rallies on 4-28 counter-protesting the misogynistic fetal idolators of popery that want everyone to forget about women’s right to life and bodily autonomy.

Sikivu Hutchinson, an African-American feminist and atheist said something to that effect at the Women in Secularism conference at the Center for Inquiry last month: where has the secular community been for poor women in the battle for reproductive rights? 

How is the fight for birth control and abortion NOT a “science interest” being threatened by patriarchal religious powerhouses when it is medical ethics and specific medical technology that is under siege precisely because it is something that saves women’s lives?

The overwhelmingly white upper-middle class ‘good ol’ boys club’ dominating the atheist/skeptic community has been trying to pressure biology professor PZ Myers to “shut Sikivu up” and chastised him for giving her a platform so her voice can be heard, so that the “freethought” community is not one more bastion of male privilege.  Many of these same “usual suspects” in the “freethought” community have also sent Taslima Nasrin vicious, threatening emails, because they’re trying to silence her, too.

If all that money that Rebecca Watson and the rest of the Skepchicks raised that ended up going into JREF’s coffers (rich white dudes’ pockets) for sending women to TAM conferences had instead gone to Planned Parenthood or the National Abortion Network Funds — that would have done far more to empower women and girls than sending women to these atheist/skeptics conferences when all that material can be found online for free anyway. Why should women further enrich these over-privileged alpha dipshits who never gave a fuck about us and who don’t want women to be liberated or even have basic human rights?

If we are going to educate women and girls on breaking the shackles of misogyny and freeing womanity from the cruel yoke of patriarchy, let’s do it right: Let’s examine suppressed history, and the wealth of knowledge unearthed by archaeologists and anthropologists that was buried under tons of patriarchal debris and demand restorative justice for women. Let us eschew ANY “enlightenment movement” , “educational foundation”, or “social justice” movement that relegates women to the margins as the  inconsequential “Other” except to provide (often unwillingly and without just compensation) expected free grata gestational “duty”  — no matter the harm and cost to us. Let us stop rewarding promoters of the rape culture.

Advancement and progress for only half of the human race but not the other is no advancement or progress at all.

Eyes Closed, No Peeking

By Tracy Lynne Stout Meisky

“Dedicated to the governor of Pennsylvania, who suggested that women upset at being forced to have an unnecessary internal ultrasound should ‘close their eyes’, and to the Georgia legislator who wants to outlaw abortion even for a woman carrying a dead fetus because ‘cows and pigs do it all the time’ , and to the gentleman in Wisconsin who wants to outlaw divorce and says that women who are abused by their husbands should just ‘remember the good times’, and… and…. and….

“Just close your eyes” he said.

Close your eyes and maybe it won’t hurt so much. Maybe you can make the shame go away if you don’t have to look at it, don’t have to meet the eyes of the doctor who is ready to violate you, who is no longer allowed to address your pain and need.

Close your eyes and deal with it because from this point on, health care for you is nothing more than a power play, the political blood sport of men, drenched in your own desperate blood.

Close your eyes, ladies, and think of Jesus who wants you to know that you are a sinner- and a slut for having dreams beyond the ones given to you by your pastor, your employer, and your governor.

See, they are worried that you might get an abortion mistakenly thinking it’s a treatment for the flu or something, eager to brand you a wanton for having sex at all, a Jezebel for enjoying pleasure without consequence…the way that they get to.

Close your eyes and pretend that you are still a person with the right to make your own, most intimate decisions about your future.

Close your eyes and remember when planning your own family wasn’t considered dirty, when owning your body was still your birthright and the right to give birth also included the right not to.

Close your eyes and forget that you are supposed to be a mindless object of desire, to be salivated over and then dismissed, used by men to sell beer and shoes and laundry detergent, expected to exist only for their sexual pleasure, reviled for feeling it yourself, condemned for being what they so determinedly make you: a sexual being.

So come here, little girl, here’s a push-up bra, stilettos and a chastity belt. Learn now that sex is something for a man to do to a woman, not actually with her.

Understand that you must grow up to be either a slut, a dyke or a mother…and a mother, and a mother.

Close your eyes, girls, and enjoy your patent leather Mary Janes and princess dreams that don’t yet end in blood and probes and congressmen playing doctor behind the statehouse, insisting that the princess carry even death in her womb, all in the name of life.

Close your eyes and think of your grandmothers, and of their grandmothers owned by their fathers, traded to their husbands, needing permission to go to college.

Think of the days when the few lady-like jobs that existed were only for those un-natural old maids unable to join the ranks of the real women doing a woman’s real job of having babies.

Think of not even being allowed to learn or to help support yourself and your family, of depending on a man to feed and clothe you and your children, your own love and need to protect them a chain and an anchor that keeps you in the harbor of even a loveless, abusive marriage, your yards and yards of beautiful sail forever stowed belowdecks, because the open seas of life is no place for a woman.

Close your eyes, ladies, and think of England; and of Iran and Afghanistan where women are chained for their own good, beaten for showing their faces, stoned for going to school, sewn shut between babies, robbed of the ability to feel passion, used for a man’s desire but allowed none of their own; receptacles, incubators, cooks and maids.

So close your eyes, and shut your mouths, and be thankful that you live in such an enlightened, modern land.”

Brava Tracy! I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Men Really Are Out to Get Women

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

The assault on women’s health is not about cost, or religious freedom, or morality. It’s all about getting the women, no matter the cost — and the majority of men are OK with that. Silence is consent. So is indifference.

Men like Pennsylvania’s governor Tom Corbett who says that women should lie back and “just close their eyes” while being medically raped with mandatory ultrasounds as punishment for getting a legal medical procedure to end an unwanted medical condition, and the rest of the he-man woman-hating lawmakers’ brigade pushing these hate crimes masquerading as laws that amount to gender apartheid against women did not get voted into office by some fairy godmother.

And their supporters are no different than Ted Bundy or Gary Leon Ridgeway in their pathological hatred for women.

Sadly, most average, working class American men are really out to get women, too — they think there’s something in it for them. They identify with those who share skin color and gender and religion, even though they really won’t get a seat at the table in Alpha Dipshit Land either.

They think if they “get the women”, they will have a shot at the wealth and power the rich white guys have, and be able to uplift their miserable asses from white male working class “hell” — they’ll get ALL the good jobs and ensure their own seat in a hierarchy of unearned privileges while it’s to hell with us women who are nothing but “leeches on society.”

They think that by getting the women with “men’s rights” groups (and the misguided feminists supporting them), paying child support won’t be an issue because they can just grab custody of the babies they force women to bear, while paying NOTHING for their “recreational” sex. And forget about welfare — us women are just “leeches” for getting “their” tax dollars or their child support (which impinges on their “fun” money) for “doing nothing” while they “work hard” (yeah, because they’ve made sure WE got deprived of any chances, any human rights, any jobs, and any liberty never mind any happiness).

And they think that we’re the enemy solely because we’re women: we should be happy to starve and go without while we’re forced to bear their progeny with no other options in life whether we want to go through pregnancy and childbirth or not. We should smile sweetly and behave demurely while they make us beggars and doormats in our own country, die by age 40 from pregnancy/childbirth, and have no healthcare, no food, no decent housing, no liberty, no human rights, no jobs (how dare we expect the same opportunities and rights men are entitled to, after all!), and no alimony or child support. The idea that we deserve respect, human rights and basic personal dignity makes us “feminazis” and “man-haters.”

States like Alabama are already pulling out of TANF. So, what welfare for destitute, vulnerable pregnant women do you think will be paid out to all those forced births due to no access to contraception and abortion? What welfare for the children? The majority of men don’t care. This is ALL about “let’s get the women” — “how DARE these seductresses tempt us and then reject us, how dare they have sexual freedom, and how dare they get MY money just for having my baby when they should have kept their slutty legs closed.” If this is chivalry, you can shove it up your ass; I’d rather have justice.

After the high profile disappearance and murder of 8 months pregnant Laci Rocha Peterson on Christmas Eve in 2002 by her fertilizer salesman husband Scott Peterson — who was leading a double life and cheating on her with a series of unwitting dupes including his thin, blonde mistress (Amber Frey) — former president George W. Bush signed the Laci and Connor Law which ostensibly was to protect vulnerable pregnant women from abuse and murder by their partners and co-conceivers. Instead of protecting society’s most vulnerable women (pregnant ones), these laws are being specifically used to deliberately hurt women.

Fetal homicide laws cropped up in nearly every state. But in over 300 cases involving miscarriage, stillbirth as a result of harm against pregnant women, only one or two men were charged with two counts of murder under these laws. Meanwhile, several hundred women who suffered miscarriages or stillbirths were subjected to discriminatory legal and judicial abuse as they were charged and convicted of “feticide.” The latest known of these casualties (which are not being reported in our mainstream media and are only being covered by foreign news correspondents) in these anti-woman ideological “culture wars” was 15 yr old Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi who was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in July 2011 for the “crime” of having a stillbirth. Nobody cared whether or not the sex or the resultant pregnancy was consensual. The co-conceiver skated into oblivion, scot-free of any consequences for his actions in impregnating an underage girl without her consent — and thus committing assault through forced gestation against her will in a state with no abortion provider and no access to reliable contraception for vulnerable women on the receiving end of men’s orgasms.

As an aside, when Scott Peterson was finally apprehended and arrested for murdering his heavily pregnant wife and dumping her body in the bay, he was in possession of $15,000 in cash, four cell phones, a shitload of Viagra, and Mapquest directions to Amber Frey’s workplace. Evidence later produced in court showed that Scott Peterson didn’t want to become a father and that he added two pornographic channels to his cable TV service only a few days after Laci’s disappearance and murder.

Scott Peterson, like many other men who murder their pregnant partners, murdered Laci because she was pregnant and he wanted to be free to have sex with other women without any consequences. He admittedly resented the financial strain that Laci’s pregnancy was putting on his “lifestyle” of recreational sex as a playboy and con artist who peddled more bullshit to get in between women’s legs than the fertilizer company he worked for. On December 14^th 2002, ten days before his wife’s disappearance and murder, Scott Peterson attended a Christmas party with Amber Frey after which he had sex with her without using any protection. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife went to a friend’s Christmas party alone because Scott “had to work.”

When Laci’s disappearance splashed across the major news stations, her “devoted” widower played the heartsick spouse and expectant father. His shambolic performance could have won him an Oscar. What Scott Peterson had not told his mistress, a struggling single mother whose 20 month old daughter he doted on, was that he was already married and that his wife was due to have his son Connor any day. He did tell Amber, however, that he didn’t want kids of his own, and that her child would be enough for them as he talked of their wonderful future together. He discussed getting a vasectomy at great length with his mistress. Too bad he didn’t do that before he married Laci Rocha while having a string of affairs behind her back while keeping his marriage a secret from all of his other bed victims.

Most men are really delusional narcissists who think that women control them when in their warped minds they feel they have a divine right to control us; that we are oppressing men because they get horny and their brains go to shit at the very sight of a pretty woman — and that’s all our fault, too for “making men desire us.” They cannot make sense of that desire when they’re taught to hate us by every cultural more, every inch of our society’s social fabric that was founded on genocide and on a framework of hatred laced with biblical notions centered on gender inferiority, holding all women daring to challenge patriarchy and misogyny as evil.

They really think that their existence as men is meaningless if they can’t beat us, rape us, force us to get pregnant against our will, torture and murder us to keep our uppity asses in line, and that they will lose their manhood if women have the same human rights as they do because then they cannot get away with dominating, abusing, exploiting and controlling us. And they think that we women will in turn be lost forever without men as considerate partners instead of as tyrannical “masters” and “lords” because we’re violating the natural order of things if we have human rights to our own bodies (our bodies and lives “belong” to men as cheap, disposable possessions, don’t ya know?).

Several out-of-the-closet misogynists — Steven Patterson (a rabid woman-hater from America’s heartland married to a Philippine woman), Richie Roberts, John Latta (Sales manager at OC Nissan in Irvine, CA), Leland Williams, Jr. (a wealthy Christian author and speaker), Richard Mork (a conservative Mormon from Sacramento, CA), and Jeff Morris, a wealthy executive at Brenau who lives in Greensboro, NC whose profile picture shows him standing next to his Mercedes Benz in front of his McMansion (yeah, he’s really oppressed) —signed into USA Today with their Facebook accounts to post venomous anti-woman vitriol.

They were posting anti-woman hate speech under the article on Hillary Clinton speaking out about the oppression of women by extremists across the world. And they all actually said all that shit verbatim about women controlling men, women as evil temptresses, and women getting everything at poor little oppressed men’s expense — which justifies depriving women of our human rights. Yeah, because fighting for our basic human rights makes us “feminazis” — which is just like Hitler invading the East Bloc, right?

Only one or two men gave a tepid response in calling out these men’s misogyny, and the few women posting were cyberbullied and run off the site by all the anti-woman bigots. What does that say about how men really feel about their wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, nieces and sisters? What does that say about how cruel men really are, and how much they hate women while having the moxy to call their victims of oppression “man-haters?” Men have been showing us who they really are all along. Hello, wake up ladies!

For over three decades, Rush Limbaugh spewed misogyny and vitriolic hate speech (calling women “feminazis” and “welfare queens” and other choice pejoratives) over public airwaves. Nobody complained except a tiny handful of women — most women feared being called a “feminist” because that’s a bad thing in “free country” AmeriKKKa.

In the voice of “righteousness” Pat Robertson said, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Even on progressive sites like Alternet, women cannot tell it like it really is without several “progressive” males jumping in to say, “that’s not fair, poor men this and poor men that”, trivializing and invalidating the real physical and psychological harm and oppression women are suffering. Everything is always all about the men, and never about the women — even among most Leftist men with a few very rare exceptions.

That male college professors are teaching Women’s Studies courses in colleges while paying far more attention and giving much more sympathy and activism support to the rights of misogynistic Muslim men in the Middle East than they do to the real deprivation of women’s human rights here and abroad says it all. Hezbollah and the Taliban have far more sympathizers and supporters in the human rights community than women and girls do.

War is immoral, except when it’s waged by men against women to preserve unearned male privilege with the deliberate intent to use sex and unwanted pregnancy to crush our spirits, our hopes and our dreams and destroy our bodies and cost us our lives by voting for misogynistic lawmakers committed to using fetuses instead of fists to injure, maim, or even kill women.

AmeriKKKa deserves the Scott Peterson Award for misogyny, and men who trivialize or minimize the deprivation of women’s human rights to have a say in what happens to our bodies are NOT women’s allies or friends. The only difference between America’s homegrown misogynists and the Taliban is 8,000 miles.

So why should women continue to sleep with the enemy, or vote for the enemy, support the “social justice” movements that will only benefit the enemy as they tell us that our human rights are so much less important than the “big picture”, or do business with the enemy to further enrich those who hate us, and hate our daughters?

The vast majority of men feel on a very visceral level that they have a divine right to subjugate, abuse, dominate, oppress, control, harm, maim, torture, socially and economically discard us, and even KILL us — by any means necessary.

You see, it’s our death-dealing vaginas to blame for their lost shot at immortality. This is what their religious doctrines say. Even the more enlightened and secular “progressive” men benefit from the unearned male privilege that their conservative brethren maintain through oppressing women. And they know it.

When the Occupy movement started, stories of rapes and sexual assaults at various camps leaked out. One survivor wrote in her Daily Kos diary of what she witnessed. The “facilitators” actually pressured the women who were raped into not going to the police, and “counseled” them to keep quiet about what happened — for the “greater good” of the movement and the need to keep “divisive, special interest” issues out of the discussion on social justice. Economic, social, civil and human rights for only half the population at the expense of the other half is no justice at all.

Few, if any, male social justice activists and journalists with access to the microphone and the media like Cenk Uygur, host and co-founder of the Internet and talk radio show Young Turks, and Christopher Hedges, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author of Death of the Liberal Class, have spoken out in defense of women’s human rights, other than to give some brief lip service but that’s about it. Women’s human rights have always been back-benched in every social justice movement in this country.

From Stokely Carmichael of the Black Panthers who said the only position for black women in the movement was “on their backs”, to the male leadership of Native American rights groups who climbed to fame and fortune while Indigenous women suffer in Third World poverty, and suffer the highest rates of murder and domestic violence, rape and unwanted pregnancies without any remedy at peril to their health and lives; to the white working class self-styled “socialists” and Leftists that blame everything on capitalism instead of on the cruel system of unearned male privilege as they deny misogyny, deny that there’s a War on Women, and trivialize the real harm to women as a result of being deprived of our basic human rights in a country by a male-dominated government that decided a 15 second old zygote and a religious corporation are “persons” but women are not.

Christopher Hedges, who chained himself to the White House fence in a publicized protest and act of civil disobedience over the war in Iraq and who spoke out about the fascist Christian Right, is noticeably silent in the face of injustice where women are the primary intended target of torture and suffering.

The one or two who timidly spoke out did so only about a quarter as vociferously against the War on Women as they have against the “1%”, the economy, and the war — even though they “love” women (they have wives and daughters, after all). Women have very few genuine allies and friends among men. That is fact; not hyperbole.

What many proudly misogynistic, selfish, narcissistic, sexually repressed, emotionally stunted psychos say on talk radio, prime time TV, during political campaign season, and post online in social media sites and in commentaries to news articles about the War on Women with very little opposition from the “good guys” loudly and boldly denouncing this legitimized misogyny reveals a lot.

My grandmother once taught me: When someone shows you who they really are, believe them.

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.

Being Marginalized and Murdered is Not a “Lifestyle Choice.”

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

A long-distance friendship with Jayson Fleury has changed my life forever. Jayson is a Saulteaux-Cree story-teller, a social justice activist, and the brother of Mona Lee Wilson who died at the hands of a serial killer — leaving her two children orphaned.

Jayson is often angry, and with good reason. As he once apologetically told me he is “a little rough around the edges.” But when he laughs it is hearty and genuine; and when he smiles, he has a smile that would melt your heart.

If more people cared enough about making a better society that was more humane and a lot less cruel and violent, maybe Jayson’s younger sister — and all the other murdered women that went missing — would be alive today. Everyone should take a moment to seriously think about what sort of society they want to live in.

My friendship with Jayson began about a month or so ago. I reached out to him through Facebook after researching aggressive violent crimes and their link to the architecture of aggression that our society really is, when I learned of the most horrific serial killer in North American history: Robert “Willie” Pickton.

For those who are unaware, Robert “Willie” Pickton and at least one other “associate” lured poor and homeless women (many whom resorted to the exploitative sex trade to survive) to his Port Coquitlam pig farm in western Canada on the outskirts of Vancouver. He butchered his victims like livestock, putting parts of their bodies through a wood-chipper and grinding them up to feed to his hogs. He mixed some of their ground up remains with some of his processed pork sausages, and disposed of an unknown amount of their remains at an animal waste rendering plant.

His killing spree spanned well over a decade before a search warrant for his property was finally executed for illegal weapons resulting in his arrest upon the grisly find of Mona Wilson’s head and feet in a garbage can in his slaughterhouse. Pickton admitted to killing 49 women, yet he was only charged and convicted of murdering six of them.

A Facebook friend of Jayson Fleury’s posted a video (which I also posted on my own Facebook page) of a short Canadian media interview with Jayson and his older sister, Lisa Bigjohn regarding their lack of closure in the loss of their younger sister whose killer(s) could have been apprehended before she became one of his last victims — if only the police had acted on the several prior tips from different people that they received over the years.

But the police bungling was part and parcel of the broader social dynamics of racism, classism, and normalized misogyny that make it OK for women to be murdered — especially poor women forced out of economic necessity into the sex trade due to a legacy of ongoing discrimination and lack of viable alternatives.

The prevalent societal attitude is that the victims of social predators like Gary Leon Ridgeway (the Green River killer) and Robert Pickton “asked for it” due to their “risky lifestyle choice.” It is this ideology that dismisses the savage realities of poverty, discrimination, and injustice in a competitive capitalist society in which poor women are dehumanized and devalued — especially poor aboriginal women. Poor women are viewed as nothing more than disposable toys to be abused and discarded at the whim of their “purchasers” who have benefited unjustly from a knapsack of unearned privileges.

Jayson Fleury’s sister and all the other women who met horrific deaths at the hands of social predators were not targeted for their “risky lifestyles.” If that were the case, then why aren’t storm chasers (like moi) targeted? Chasing down an F-5 tornado, trying to catch a twister by its tail, is a very risky lifestyle choice, is it not? What about Formula One race car drivers? Why aren’t they targeted because of their risky behavior? How about skydivers who knowingly agree to incur internal organ and tissue damage caused by the force of several g’s from trying to set new records for time in free-fall at terminal velocity (about 200 mph or 90 m/s)?

There is a huge difference between choosing any of these activities versus “choosing” survival sex for lack of options in a society that never provided enough living wage jobs or adequate social income support where poor women are denied chances for a decent life, including opportunities for skilled trades training and hiring in good-paying male-dominated jobs.

No little girl aspires to become a prostitute when she grows up.

No little girl looks forward to ending up as another sad statistic without a face.

No woman should ever have to choose between abuse, dysfunction, and poverty and the violent exploitative sex trade in order to survive and/or support their children.

No woman deserves to be dehumanized and commodified in life and slated for death without dignity.

Being a feminist is not only about fighting for women’s access to reproductive choice with a full range of reliable contraception and an abortion if necessary; it’s about also fighting for the social and economic valuing of women who are mothers and promoting respect for all women’s human rights. It’s also about securing the right to safe and non-traumatizing, pain-free childbearing that is woman-centered. And it is about fighting for a society in which no woman is left behind.

George Sodini, Spree Killer and Misogynistic “Beta” Males

 

Jacqueline S. Homan

 

On August 4 2009, George Sodini shot up a gym full of women at an aerobic’s class before turning the gun on himself in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Within days of the shooting that left 3 women dead and 9 wounded, including the pregnant aerobics instructor, George Sodini’s online diary of his sexual frustration at being a “beta” male and his hatred for women and plans to go on a killing spree was made widely known.

Sodini was also a member the PUA community (Pick Up Artists) which advise men on how to lie/coerce/harass their way in between women’s legs (this is called “game.”) And it turns out that he had subscribed to huckster R. Don Steel’s seminars advising older beta males on how to “score” pretty young women that are young enough to be their daughters.

Unfortunately, there is a large pool of men out there with this entitlement attitude; and they’re mostly of the white and selfish middle to upper-middle class flavor.

One blog comprised of this “community” of males is riddled with over a thousand comments from men who hailed Sodini as a “hero” for teaching women a lesson: namely that not giving men — no matter how socially repulsive and hateful towards women — their “right” to sexual satisfaction, dead women are the “tax” society will have to pay. One poster, “Arpagus” said regarding Sodini:

I am calling him a hero for being a symbol for the consequences of denying men sex, not for killing those women. Obviously they didn’t personally deserve it. But something like this has to happen, perhaps hundreds of times over again, before feminists get the message. As Bhetti observed, it can easily go the other way and create more anti-male sentiment instead. There probably won’t be much sympathy, but maybe fear. From reading his blog it is so clear-cut that celibacy was the problem. (No wonder it has been taken down.) And even fear of the “nice guy” is an improvement. Fear can cause social change even if sexually frustrated men always will be met with the attitude that they don’t deserve to get laid and are basically human garbage as Bhetti believes.

I know the feminist media will try to emphasize his other issues and downplay the sexual frustration. Even so, his other issues mostly seem to result from an absent father (who was just a “sperm donor” in his words), and that is not supposed to be a problem according to the feminists either. So either way this is good press for the MRA movement.

These men all have one thing in common: they view women as “less than”, as objects less deserving of equal human and civil rights, and as something they have a “divine right” to.

One male poster, “whiskey”, who is probably only marginally slightly less selfish and Neanderthalic than the rest, said that men are not “investing in women” and this is the crux of the problem. But he still missed the boat. I responded with a post of my own. However, given that that blog is misogynist central and moderated, I don’t expect my reply to be published. Therefore, I am posting it here:

Viewing women as nothing more than reproductive chattel, as fuck holes that exist only for men’s benefit and sexual pleasure (while it’s to hell with our sexual pleasure, including our right to prevent unintended pregnancy which ruins our bodies and risks our health and lives — only to end up having to fight for child support); and viewing women as things to own instead of as equal partners of a species is not the way to “invest in women.”

Treating women like the human beings we are whose needs and feelings matter is a damn good start. But I am not seeing that from any of the men posting here.

Instead, I am seeing women being called “cunts”, “bitches”, “cameltoes”, “jezebel twats”, and “dumbasses” along with other pejoratives — all which imply that women somehow deserve to be punished for being children of a lesser god, that we aren’t even human enough in these men’s eyes for any kind of harm to us to matter.

According to the most recent census data, there are 44 million Americans living below the federal poverty level — 84% whom are women. Many are ending up permanently disabled or dying prematurely for lack of access to basic resources and things like medical and dental care.

Jobs considered “women’s work” don’t pay enough to live on, yet women who aren’t “pretty and thin enough” who get left on the shelf have no choice but to work to support themselves, and often a child or two (thanks to mostly beta “pump and dumpers”), and we don’t get to pay less to do all that than a man.

Yet, the majority of men posting here want all the free sex they can get (from only the most perfect-looking young babes) while promoting job discrimination, imbalanced power relationships in marriage/divorce, and the impoverishment of all women, while us women get nothing in return — not even the benefit of a commitment and equal access to the marital assets, including the checking account, and something “extra” for us once in awhile even though the men are entitled to their young mistresses on the sly, their expensive toys and hobbies while we get nothing. And that is somehow “fair?”

Listen up misogynists and selfish nitwits of all stripes who bitch about not “getting any”: everything isn’t all about you.

There is a lot of prejudice against fat women, against plain-looking women, against older women, against poor people, and against disabled people. There is also a stereotype that assigns such people to the category of “unfucakable”, or at least, “asexual.”

Yet many of us who fall into one or more of those categories end up having fulfilling sex lives and marriages. Is everything a bed of roses? No. But no one has a perfect life. That’s an illusion; just like our “meritocracy” and the American Dream.

George Sodini and these Mens’ Rights Advocates and PUA’s are a large part of the problem, not so much the victims of it. They see women as commodities with which to attain a higher social status in our class-stratified capitalistic society — a “trophy” with which to keep score of their masculinity, not as human beings.

There is a serious disconnect between their hatred of women and their desire for women. But they only desire women as inanimate sex toys that double as “arm candy” to inflate their egos, and then they wonder why they can’t “score” with the women who they claim to hate. By being selfish and inconsiderate, they’ve made themselves “unfuckable.”

No woman wants to go to bed with a man who really doesn’t give a shit about her — not even enough to ensure she enjoys the sex too, and enough to respect her right to not risk unwanted pregnancy which puts her body, wellbeing and life 100% at risk, not the man’s. It does not matter how much or little he makes or how “fit and trim” he looks.

George Sodini had so much more than 80% of those in this country who struggle, suffer in poverty (one paycheck away from homelessness) without access to health and dental care, never mind a decent house and a car. He had more than most in America ever got/will get the chance to have. He had a six figure a year salary at a cushy job with health and dental benefits, a nice car, a house in a middle class area, and a net worth of $250,000.

How many women in poverty would love to have the privilege of a nice smile with their natural teeth, like George Sodini, but don’t due to a real lack of equal opportunity for middle class jobs with health and dental benefits and many women don’t find a middle class male willing to commit and provide her with that via his good job? Let’s put things into perspective here.

These men are not being sexually ghettoized because of being poor, disabled, or physically repulsive. It’s more likely that they’re not getting laid because they’re misogynists who treat women like meatpuppets they somehow feel “entitled” to “have”; rather than treating women like people. We as a society need to start evolving beyond this patriarchal privilege shit and treat each other with respect, as human beings worthy of love, affection, and sex — not as a “score” or as a special class who is “owed” something that others are somehow not. As for the element out there who consider certain classes of people as “unfuckable”, you don’t have to participate in that.

When your goal is not to meet people to get to know, talk with, hang out with and maybe sleep with, but instead just to meet someone “hot” to masturbate inside of; you’re not trying to meet a person. You’re trying to meet an object, a thing, a sperm receptacle. You’re not looking for a hot girlfriend because you find her interesting and sexually attractive. You’re looking for a disposable fuck trophy. There’s no deeper, more debased commodification than that. It is important to recognize the link between this commodification of every aspect of our lives, and especially of an entire group of people (women) within capitalism’s architecture of aggression and competitiveness which reduces our collective humanity.

 

"Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie", by Jacqueline S. Homan