“This is the war and not the warning.” 54-40
You are either with us or against us.
I am super tired right now.
Women are not safe. Haven’t really been for centuries.
Once upon a cave ago women were seen for what they were, the bringers of life, sacred, something to be protected.
In a hunter/gatherer society men hunted, women gathered. Our basic physiology dictates that’s the way things are. Women nurture, men protect. They’d go out hunting for food, we’d make sure they had a comfortable home to come back to. We used to be symbiotic, there wouldn’t be a human race without this basic principle. We have lost this.
Grocery stores and office jobs, the industrial revolution, free trade for cheap trinkets, factory farming and even the internet upon which you are reading this have all contributed to our downfall. Roles are no longer rigidly defined for the sole purpose of survival, which is great and all, but this discombobulation has spawned a battle of the sexes and it’s really fucking ugly.
I’m ashamed to admit I had an internet fight with a friend.
I hate internet fights, even if you win…it isn’t winning. It’s a colossal waste of time.
What sparked it was a very leftist feminist statement by Lena Dunham calling for the extinction of the straight white male.
My opinion? She is not wrong.
His opinion? This statement was the death of the feminist movement. It was TOO extreme.
Now, I get his side, he is a straight white male and it IS an extreme reaction.
I tried to explain that women have been living under extreme circumstances for years.
Imagine if you will a dystopia where women are afraid to walk down the street alone for fear of cat calls and assault. Oh wait, that’s every fucking woman every fucking day.
So the answer is to not leave our homes unescorted?
I haven’t been to a bar in years unless I was very specifically on a date or in a group.
Fine, I get that, I don’t like it but I get it. It’s dark, people are drunk…still not okay, but I concede.
Herein lies the bigger problem. I can’t go to the laundromat, grocery store or post office without some man saying some damned thing. Unwanted, unwelcomed, uninvited, just because I left my house alone?
My straight white male friend’s initial comment? Well where are you hanging out?
Excuse me?
Let me further state that this is still a problem even when women are AT HOME if you count varying wormholes in the internet where the vilest of the vile can get through. Sitting at my laptop isn’t safe, holding my phone, having any presence on social media whatsoever. You can lock your shit down tight as a drum and somehow the dick pics and rape threats keep coming.
It’s not always so extreme.
I have had some random straight white dude who saw me on Tinder in July sending me two or 3 messages a month, via Instagram with no rhyme or reason, just ‘sup’ and ‘hey we should hang sometime’. Its’ up to about a dozen messages now, all unanswered and yet they keep coming. Chinese water torture.
I didn’t right swipe him for the record. Gave no indication of interest whatsoever.
I don’t understand the mentality of this. Mind you I won’t go to a party unless I have an invitation and permission in triplicate, such is my disdain and shame for being somewhere I don’t feel wanted or welcome.
So I am to think/believe that I invite this behavior because I exist?
And he thinks Lena Dunham is too extreme?
If you read her actual commentary she wasn’t calling for a roundup and mass cleansing of straight white males. Akin to the ‘Salvagings’ depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood wherein women live in a state of severe repression and their only outlet is these occasional public hangings and rallies where they literally rip a man to shreds and death for crimes against other women.
Considering the light sentences handed out to straight white men for violent sexual crimes against women, we could use a good Salvaging methinks.
Extremism breeds extremism.
She doesn’t want anyone dead. She is calling for the termination of an ideology. This straight white male privileged rhetoric that poses a threat to anyone who isn’t straight, white or male.
I furthered my argument by saying it is a straight while male problem. If I asked a black man or a gay man or any visible minority if they had experienced unwanted attention walking down the street the answer would be a resounding YES.
Any radical change to an oppressed people always begins with radical statements and behavior.
As a collective we have been saying ‘hey guys, stop’ for quite some time now. And it doesn’t stop.
What continues to happen is shit like Brock Turner getting 60 days in jail for really brutal rape, Trump on TV saying “grab em by the pussy” and it’s toxic as fuck. Lena Dunham is saying/doing something with the same blatant hostility towards the perpetrators of said behavior. I fail to see how it is offensive nor how she should be shamed for it.
I posted a comment on another friend’s page under a meme that was attempting to prove that Donald Trump isn’t a racist. I simply stated that yes, he is. Some straight white male went on a 6 hour rant about how I shouldn’t have kids, I should find a nice man to look after me, about how women shouldn’t have the right to vote.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Nietzsche
I love Nietzsche, I am by definition a pacifist I don’t want to fight. But I am tired of being afraid.
I see no other recourse than women becoming monsters to fight this situation that has been created under centuries of patriarchal nonsense and oppression.
At no point do I believe Lena Dunham meant all straight white men.
I believe they are our only allies in this. When women speak, a lot of them don’t listen to us, but they seem to listen to others of their kind.
I was raised by a good man, I am dating a good man, I have spectacular male friends and I raised my son to be a good man.
I said before, the human race would have died out a long time ago if ALL men behaved this way.
But I am going to need some men to acknowledge that some other men do this shit.
And stop it.
Men do this shit.
And blame women for it.
yep. thank you for standing beside us