Class Justice As A Cover For Preserving Male Privilege

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

Some class justice activists claim that “rich liberals” have alienated white working class males and poor whites. There is an element of truth in that. Poor whites who have been economically excluded and socially marginalized are at the bottom of the pile: many class justice activists say that poor whites are not “cool” enough for the liberal elite who brag about their “nice African-American friends” but never about their “nice poor white friends.” But too often, class justice activists have a bad habit of using class justice as a vehicle for driving the interests of men to the front of the line with white men leading the parade while demanding that women and minorities — many whom are far worse off than poor white guys — shut up about our rights that are always getting trampled on by white males up and down the socio-economic ladder. Women and minorities are silenced in these Leftist class justice groups with the “Oppression Olympics” cudgel wielded by white dudes that are much better off than women and minorities within the same social class because white dudes have power over women and minorities and that power is the right to dominate — something that is conferred by white male privilege. 

Working class white males are not subjected to forced organ donation at peril to their health, wellbeing and lives — which is what forced pregnancy/childbirth really amounts to — as punishment for having sex and gratifying men’s sexual “needs”; or being raped. In fact, poor white males and working class white males who commit rape are more than likely to get away with it because our male-supremacist society holds that women and girls that are raped somehow “asked for it”, and are often forced to bear rape progeny against their will in “pro-life” America where access to abortion is practically non-existent since the Congressmen elected by white working class males claim that women can’t get pregnant from a “legitimate rape” because women’s bodies have a way to “shut that whole thing down” and if pregnancy should occur from rape, it’s a “gift from God.”

White working class males are not forced to suffer in utter agony for several days in hospitals and even forced to die cruel and torturous deaths that are entirely preventable as a matter of some moralistic policy that is selectively invoked to deny them preventive medical care that would ameliorate their suffering and save their lives. They’re not left to “bleed out” in emergency rooms because of “pro-life” laws and policies that deprive them of their right to life, liberty, bodily autonomy and bodily integrity. 

Working class white males are not targeted for police brutality simply for being out in public. Had Trayvon Martin been a working class white male as opposed to a black male, he’d be alive today because white men don’t get gunned down by neighborhood watchmen for walking home from the store because of wearing hoodies while packing cell phones, iced tea, and candy. 

White working class males also rape, impregnate and batter white working class women while supporting lawmakers, governors, attorney generals and judges who pass laws that force women to be vulnerable to unwanted and risky pregnancies, and force women and girls to give birth against our will regardless of how we feel about it and regardless of the harm to us.  And white working class men have the moxy to tell poor women that our basic human right to bodily autonomy is a less important “side issue” in the male supremacist scheme of things.

White working class males in the class justice camp deliberately play the class card to ensure that women and minorities who are oppressed by male privilege and white privilege respectively are once again side-lined, back-benched, and marginalized while the concerns of white men are made more important. And it’s also these same “poor, put-upon abandoned” white men that put their “right” to have sex ahead of women’s right to not be made pregnant when they don’t want to go through it, or suffer other harm and injuries as a result of satisfying men’s sexual “needs.”

Many of these same white working class men consume women’s bodies as disposable sex commodities through porn use and the patronizing of strip joints. And these same working class men defend their “right” to use their pursuit of an orgasm to dictate women’s oppression by white-washing the sex trade in terms of “choice” and “female empowerment.”

Working class white men have an ongoing miserable track record of dominating women and minorities and they feel entitled to keep doing it. This “abandoned” voting bloc throwing mantrums any time oppressed people’s rights are given attention were not abandoned by the Left. They brought a lot of it on themselves. They shove the valid claims, rights and needs of women to the end of the line and act like the only people deserving of anything are men — white men. And they don’t care if their comfort comes at the expense of women and minorities (as always).

To demand that women cede our long overdue valid claims for social justice which remain unaddressed and telling us to shut up about our rights and needs in order to avoid being “divisive” to assuage the egos of those who use their male privilege to dominate us and keep us disempowered under the deceptive guise of class justice is beyond selfish and narcissistic. It is the motherlode of injustice at best, and at worst it is a license to perpetuate oppression with the intent of ensuring that men remain at the top and in charge.

All the ballyhooing about the “abandoned working class white male voter” really amounts to the preservation of unearned white male privilege and white male supremacy. Liberation from “the 1%” and a bigger piece of the pie but only for white dudes while women should just shut up and be grateful if we’re even acknowledged at all. Class justice has become a cover for white working and middle class men’s usurpation of victimhood status at women’s expense, with working class and poor women bearing the brunt.

White working class men have no right to demand that women defer to them in the name of social justice. And class justice activists have no right to expect women’s capitulation to that unreasonable demand, which is precisely what they’re doing when they chastise radical feminists for refusing to comply with the agenda of the Almighty Penis Parade.

Saying that women should just shut up about our issues because addressing our need for justice is “divisive” when we’re fed up with being expected to just take more ongoing misogyny on the chin after centuries of being marginalized — all for the sake of building bridges of solidarity with those who actively participate in depriving us of our rights — is like saying that Jews in Nazi death camps should have sympathized with the working class Nazi guards and put those oppressors’ comfort first because those working class Nazi guards were equally oppressed by “the man” as the Jewish slave labor prisoners slated for extermination. Think that would go over well with Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren? Yeah, me neither.

The fact is that we really can’t “just move on” as if centuries of ongoing oppression did not happen while it’s continuing to happen today, despite the malestream media downplaying or denying it. Until reparations and restorative justice is made to women as a class, we really can’t all “just get along.” For class justice activists to expect that from radical feminists is ludicrous, given that women have far fewer rights and opportunities today than we did in 1973. As long as women are subject to laws and policies that are male-centric and forced to live under a hierarchy of ongoing male domination with white males at the top, any talk of class justice is moot.

White working class union men with middle class paychecks and health and dental benefits and retirement plans never wanted women to have anything. They begrudged poor women the same jobs that they felt entitled to while also begrudging us paltry, inadequate welfare checks on “their hard-earned tax dollars” in order to survive. I recall in the 1980′s with the Reagan Revolution aiming its Hotchkiss guns at poor women on welfare who, in many cases, were economically and socially excluded for generations due to sexism on top of classism, and it was white working class union MEN who voted for Reagan TWICE as they drove around in new Ford trucks sporting bumper stickers that read “Rush is right!”

These white working class men — who were/are far better off than poor women of ANY race — blamed “women’s libbers” for women “taking away (white) men’s jobs” while saying that care-taking and motherhood wasn’t real work and was of no importance or value (not enough value to even be worthy of an inadequate welfare subsistence check) because giving men sexual gratification on demand and bearing babies is what women are for and if a woman ended up being a poor single mother it was her own fault. Even though it was MEN who passed the Hyde Amendment and chipped away at poor women’s access to reliable birth control, and even though it was MEN who impregnated all those women and then abandoned them, or forced them to flee with nothing but their kids and the clothes on their backs after abusing them.

White working class men who claim they’ve been abandoned as a constituency need to first take responsibility for deliberately voting for Reagan (twice) and Congressmen like Newt Gingrich, Todd Akin, and all the rest who ran on platforms of opposing Affirmative Action (which never went far enough), eliminating welfare for the very poor (most whom are women), and supporting measures that have basically returned most women to the status of male-owned reproductive chattel. Men need to take responsibility for causing their own economic demise by voting for those who destroyed their unions and off-shored their jobs while assuring them with every dog whistle speech that their “right” to maintain power and domination over women and people of color would be unfettered in the name of “freedom” and “personal responsibility.”

Men need to take responsibility for using their penises like loaded weapons. They need to take responsibility for all the unwanted pregnancies their sexual selfishness caused and the childbirth injuries (including maternal death) to women they inflicted, for all the rapes they commit, for the abortion clinics they bombed, and for the abortion doctors they shot. They need to take responsibility fpr the violence they resorted to in order to force women and minorities out of good-paying union jobs that were — and still are — white male dominated. And they need to take responsibility for all the porn they consume as if it’s their right to objectify and commodify women and children. They need to take responsibility for the domestic terrorism committed by the anti-woman, anti-black, anti-Jewish gun-toting, tax-protesting jerks they supported and sympathized with. They need to take responsibility for the MRA bowel movement which gave us 31 states that grant rapists “fathers’ rights” over the children they sired by rape with visitation and joint custody. And they need to take responsibility for being war hawks and bullies. They need to do their part to dismantle patriarchy and all its systems of unearned privileges. And they need to ditch their sense of entitlement.

It was all these things that men refuse to take responsibility for that caused their alienation and earned contempt from feminists, racial justice activists, and “snobby libruls” whom they blame for problems that they brought on themselves.

Women don’t owe white working class men in the class justice movement a pity party with milk and cookies when men never even apologized for all the shit they did to women, and are still doing to women, to keep women at the bottom of every pile. It only takes a critical number of members of the oppressor group to dismantle the system of oppression they created and that number boils down to about 25% of men. Which goes to show how little men care about women, and how rare and scarce decent and fair-minded men really are.  Sorry, but there are some people that you just can’t build coalitions with because they are not your allies and don’t really care to be, either. Men need to get their own house in order by setting their male chauvinist ‘homies’ straight and working on dismantling the patriarchy they created and maintain before expecting women to be considerate of their delicate feelings in the name of “class solidarity.”

Men who sacrifice the human rights of their own wives, sisters, nieces and daughters on the altar of the phallocracy just to animate their ‘uniform’ of race and sex that they share with rich white sexist men like Mitt Romney don’t need a pity party — they need a good swift kick in the ass for having the moxy to cry “abandonment” after they’ve been sticking it to women, minorities, and the very poor for the better part of the last three decades.

The brutal and horrific oppression of women by men through all of the forced pregnancy/childbirth laws passed in nearly every state, including the federal defunding of Planned Parenthood, was not the work of just a “few bad apples”; it was the coordinated effort of entire state governments — from governors to attorney generals to the majority of state legislatures. The War on Women was launched, and for the most part won by men, because the majority of states have state governments that are full of men like Todd Akin and Rick Santorum. And it was working class white males acting in solidarity with their bourgeois brethren who propelled these selfish, narcissistic and sadistic male supremacist pigs into prosperity and power by voting for them without giving a shit about what it meant for women and how we feel about it.

Depriving women of any social class of the right to an abortion and access to reliable birth control is depriving women of basic human rights over our own bodies. Denying rape victims the right to an abortion is exceptionally cruel because for many women, pregnancy after rape means that the rape isn’t over and will further traumatize them with extreme pain, disfigurement, and debilitated health. It means compounding an already unspeakable trauma. It is cruelty and torture aimed solely at women by men for the sheer damn hell of it. And no, working class white males cannot lay all of this at the feet of the 1% and a few crazy Congressmen. Lawmakers, governors, and attorney generals don’t get into office without votes and campaign volunteers. And all of these anti-woman laws — which have yet to be repealed — are no excuse for working class white men inflicting unwanted pregnancies on their bed victims because their penis feel-good time is somehow more important than having any consideration for women’s human rights.

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!

All-male Congressional Birth Control Panels and Rush Limbaugh’s Non- Apology

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

The right to freedom of religion is the right of an individual or group to practice their faith among themselves, but within limits. There are many religious practices that are not legal, moral or ethical that the 1^st Amendment does not protect: human sacrifice, ritual animal mutilation, and polygamy just to name a few. Just ask about how much the right to “freedom of religion” absolved polygamist human trafficker Warren Jeffs, leader of the FLDS, of his prison term. But I digress.

The right to “freedom of religion” is NOT a right to abrogate an entire identifiable group of people of their human rights, nor is it a right to enter the public/secular sphere by owning businesses, schools, hospitals, or social service agencies and through these vehicles, force or coerce all those who work for them (or who have no other choice for obtaining services) to follow their dogma and doctrines.

If Catholic hospitals only treated Catholic patients and only employed Catholic staff, that would be one thing. But they don’t. Their hospitals serve the public and employ members of the public of different faiths, and of no faith at all. At that point, a sectarian institution gives up its rights to coerce others into fowling its doctrine and religious teachings.

President Obama made a very generous compromise when he offered to have insurance companies pick up the tab for contraception (which can run as high as $100/mo) rather than ask the tax-exempt churches to do it. This is exactly within the letter and spirit of the 1^st Amendment of the US Constitution. And institutions that accept federal tax dollars are NOT exempt from public law, including laws regulating commerce.

According to the IRS, in order to qualify as a 501(3)(c) non-profit organization, churches and their affiliated charitable organizations MUST:

1. NOT use a substantial part of their money or activities to attempt to influence legislation.
2. NOT use their money and activities to intervene in political campaigns.
3. Maintain purposes and activities that are legal.
4. NOT violate fundamental laws and public policy.

And not one single Republican in Congress has been willing to call out the initial act — which was prior to Rush Limbaugh’s latest publicly aired verbal sewage against women — that Darrell “Car Thief” Issa (R-CA) refused to allow testimony from a single woman on the question of birth control. Any condemnation of Rush Limbaugh’s remarks must also reflect the fact that an all-male panel convened by Darrell Issa wouldn’t allow ANY testimony from the group of people who need and use contraception.

Every tiny gain women have made, we have had to fight to keep — often paying for it with our lives. It’s time to kick misogynists in AmeriKKKa where it hurts for once and for all, and not let them up even if they cry “uncle” because history has shown us that misogynists — like all other sociopaths — in every culture never give up and stop on their own volition. They have to be stopped.

Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Bishop Lori, the pope, Darrell Issa, Ron Paul and his Teabangelical son Rand “Head Stomp” Paul — all came into this world on the blood, pain, trauma and bodily sacrifice of a woman. Not one of them respects women as persons deserving of human rights. They talk about “fetal pain” but callously disregard the pain a woman suffers in childbirth, which sometimes causes a woman to go into shock, “stroke out”, or die from a massive heart attack.

Not one of them acknowledges the sanctity of women’s lives — that no woman or girl should be punished with the trauma, pain and disfigurement of forced childbirth at peril to her health, wellbeing, liberty and life for the “crime” of satisfying some male’s sexual “needs.” (Who does Rush Limbaugh and his like-minded male supremacist pigs in Congress think women on birth control are having sex with? Ourselves? Each other?)

Rush Limbaugh’s scripted “apology”, which really was no apology at all, is not good enough considering all the harm and damage his publicly broadcasted venomous, misogynistic spleen these past 30 years has caused for women due to his influence on public policy (as admitted by some rich white male Congressmen) — all of which helped to promote and perpetuate our “rape culture.”

To dismiss Rush Limbaugh as “only an entertainer” is like calling dog shit “chocolate candy.” And what sort of people seek to continue the harm and injustice and deprivation of human rights against women for “entertainment” anyway? What message does that send to women and girls in this society?

If the potential human life of a fetus is more important and valuable than that of a sentient woman or girl because the fetus is “human”, then what the hell is the woman? Obviously, she’s not human or there would be more care for her wellbeing. That’s the same logic that legitimized the enslavement of African-Americans and kept them from enjoying the same human rights as white males.

Women who survive the ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth are often stuck with varying degrees of permanent damage to their bodies that diminish their quality of life. For this, women are not compensated. And now, it seems that women are going to be forced to endure this against our will. And no, a “healthy baby” does not make up for that. A “prize”, no matter how wonderful, does not cure physical and psychological trauma in any situation. We don’t tell a man who lost his legs that he should be grateful he didn’t lose his arms; It’s no different for women who have suffered trauma from childbirth — especially if the pregnancy wasn’t wanted in the first place.

No woman is obligated to give birth just because she had sex. To say otherwise is cruel, narcissistic and sadistic. Pregnancy is not a “gift” when it’s forced. The experiences of pregnancy/childbirth and the baby are separate things. The attitude that a healthy baby makes women forget all about the pain, trauma and lasting physical damage from their pregnancy and birth experience is bullshit. Women carry that experience with them for life. Fatalism and stoicism are not the same as “getting over it.”

The idea that fetal pain matters but the pain, trauma and disfigurement women are expected to suffer in childbirth as a mandatory punishment for having sex shows just how easily the UN Convention of Torture can be subverted when it’s women being targeted for sexual and reproductive torture.

Denying women the human right to have control over what happens to our bodies by imposing a sexual double standard in denying us access to reliable contraception and abortion, and denying women adequate pain relief during childbirth without a scientifically valid reason (and there really isn’t any) while making sure Viagra and penis stents are legal and available for every selfish jerk that wants to get it up so he can masturbate in some woman’s body without any concern for what his orgasm may cost her — is state-sponsored gender-specific torture and a crime against humanity.

The legal language in Article 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment spells out the definition of torture. This was ratified by the US Senate in 1994. Torture is the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical pain or suffering by, or with the consent of, state authorities for a specific purpose. Methods of torture include rape, sexual assault, and forced childbirth.

In 2009, 49% of all surveyed Americans said that the use of torture under certain circumstances is “often” or “sometimes” justified while 85% of Europeans oppose it. In 2007, evangelical pastor and former Nixon administration staffer Chuck Colson wrote that torture might be “inconsistent with the Christian understanding of human dignity but as with all moral obligations, there may be circumstances for exception.”

No matter how “pro-lifers”, social conservatives, and Christians want to spin it, the devastating effects and injuries of torture cannot be bifurcated by drawing some imaginary line between “faith” and political issues — a line they cross at their convenience in the name of “religious freedom.”

In 2006, the same US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) that is today in 2012 promoting the sexual and reproductive torture of forced pregnancy and childbirth against an entire identifiable group of people (women), asserted that policies permitting torture and inhumane treatment are “shocking and morally intolerable.” The USCCB also said, “Let America abolish torture now — without exceptions.”

Apparently, abolishing torture “without exceptions” doesn’t apply to women. This same powerful Vatican lobby group shamelessly promotes the torture of women and girls with forced childbirth, even at peril to our health and lives, by influencing Congress and shaping public policy to deprive women of access to contraceptives and abortion — even in cases of rape or where pregnancy will kill a woman. That’s what “conscience clause” laws and “fetal personhood” laws being pushed by Christians and their misogynistic hangers-on imposes: Torture and chattel enslavement of women, no matter the harm and cost to us.

Every society teaches its members what they need to have or do in order to belong. And being able to belong, to fit in, to be socially accepted and loved, ranks in importance of human needs right alongside food and water, according to human development specialist Abraham Maslow. In our society, a woman’s “worthiness” for everything from social acceptance to a good job to love and commitment is solely based on her ability to conform to men’s shallow, superficial and unrealistic standards of physical attractiveness which is very unforgiving of the realities of aging, genetics, metabolism problems, poverty, and the ravages and rigors of childbearing.

For women who have abandonment issues, especially those who were the deserted result of an unwanted pregnancy, or who lived through their parents’ divorce, the risk of being discarded by your “Prince Charming” over shallow, superficial reasons makes the traditional gender role of unpaid housewife and motherhood so not worth it. Women who fail to get their pre-pregnancy bodies back, despite making superhuman efforts to do so, are told by everybody else that “having a baby is no excuse for letting yourself go.”

Women suffering from abandonment issues are already emotionally fragile and insecure enough as it is and don’t need any more hate dumped on them as gratuity for sacrificing their bodies, careers, educations and risking their health and lives by providing compulsory gestational service for some selfish prick’s genetic material. And a cheap Hallmark card, a box of chocolates, and a bouquet of flowers once a year on Mother’s Day (if you’re lucky) doesn’t make up for all that.

Now, think about misogyny and sexism as a sacrosanct religious belief, as “entertainment”, and as public policy and what message that sends in our society about where women and girls belong: in the cemetery by age 45 after being physically worn out by endless cycles of pregnancy and childbirth from menarche to menopause (if we make it) — right about the time we women lose our ornamental value to men, and to a male-centric society that worships youth and fitness (read: thin, tight bodies with perky breasts) and that marginalizes and punishes women who can’t look 20 at age 40, or whose bodies don’t “snap right back” after taking a beating from pregnancy and giving birth, often with permanent consequences that are far more severe than mere aesthetic side effects.

A trip to any old country cemetery will quickly verify the multitude of women’s premature deaths as casualties from men’s “right” to an orgasm at women’s expense.

Solidarity for the Few

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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