So while I’m contemplating that, I’ll leave you all with this thought: my opinions aren’t worth the electricity it takes to share them and in the end they don’t really matter anyhow.

I am a woman after all.

Normally I don’t talk much about idiots (male people) but I thought I’d share this little story with you all:

A couple of months ago Chonky advised me that one of the *feminists* at faux-gressive dudebro site, Democraticunderground dot com, was again doing battle with said faux-gressive dudebros and suggested that I break my promise to myself never to return to that dump in order that I might catch a sister‘s back.

I don’t remember now what the issue was (rape culture does too exist, or some such) but having been familiar with this woman for a number of years, we could see that she had grown quite a lot in her feminism. So Sargasso Sea’s semi-identical cousin, Feldspar, donned her hip-highs and waded back into the muck of malestream politics.

Yick.

And although Feldspar claims to have more patience for stupid dude talk than her radical cousin, even she could barely handle the insipid level of what passes as “argument” or “debate” so she really only made an appearance when absolutely necessary. But, yesterday this woman (we’ll call her Blackjack) announced that she was relinquishing her position as host of the Feminist group and leaving the site all together. Many pleaded with her to stay, many understood her frustration because they were struggling themselves, but only Feldspar actively encouraged her to pack her shit and GO, move on, you’re too big for this now, there’s another world waiting for you!  A world of opportunity and adventure in the dude-free colonies!

Also, just to mention, this Feminist group is lumped in under the banner of “Gender and Orientation” so that it is in the fine company of the LGBTQAWTFBBQ Group and the oh, so under-represented minority class, “Men’s Group”. You heard me right; one guess as to who feels like it’s well within their rights to come to Feminist space to educate the “ladies” about Feminism and then demand to be educated as to why “ladies” is not acceptable in Feminist space?

Many, many women who have come before me have talked about the way men take up way more than their fair share of space, how they demand smiles, how they wheedle and whine to get their way and all of these things are easily seen when one is paying attention.

The would-be Separatist’s question is what to do with that knowledge, if anything.

The first time I remember acting on the knowledge, face-to-face with a male person in public, was on the Thursday I was purchasing a laptop for The Kid who had just recently begun home schooling (un-schooling, really). I walked into the office supply store and told the young man posted at the door that I was there to pay for X Computer, that I had already called, that it was waiting in the back with my name on it and would he be so kind as to have someone fetch it to the counter for me, thank you very much. Instead of calling the stock room on his radio, he asked me what I needed X Computer for and was I sure that I had chosen the right one. Did I have any questions he could answer?

My first thought was to rip out his tongue for exercising his privilege to question my intelligence on sight, but instead, after a couple of beats of charged silence and with dead seriousness I repeated that I’d be waiting at the counter.

It doesn’t seem like a big thing, and it wouldn‘t have been, but it was the first time I really, really saw with clear vision the fear that is born of confusion when a woman doesn’t play her part, doesn’t acquiesce.

And when I processed that, my hindsight reminded me that I’d sensed that particular fear many times before but only had a shaky framework from which to capture and identify it. No longer, though.

They really should be afraid of our good reason.

Instead my morning started with Chonky (and I) spending a couple of hours back and forth on the phone with her “father”, the Senior Care Provider Company, LLC™ and the property manager of the habitat in which he is “wintering” His Most Pescious-almost-100-year-old buttocks,  trying to set everyone straight on basic issues that have already been covered about 14 times since November. There are a total of six grown women who *look out* for him there in varying capacities, but not counting the women who clean his apartment, serve him at the restaurant, etc., and all of them are questioning themselves and us (the two women who make sure that the bills are paid!) because HE told them something different.

And, today, I am reminded just how much male-centric mental infrastructure can still inspire me to infuriation.  So much so that it sort of sucked the lalalalala right out of me and this entire Dude-Free Thursday.

In the meantime please see Undercover Punk’s latest post as it dovetails ever so nicely with the separatist/”revolution”/resolution discussion-at-large and I personally give it:

Two Sisters Up! (OO)

Also, as I began writing this I realized that it will be (of necessity) a series of at least two parts, maybe more, depending on the level of detail that seems appropriate. – Sargasso Sea)

*******************************

A few days ago Nine Deuce said that separatism is a viable option for just a handful of women and that she is not one of them. In a comment she chose not to publish, I asked her to elaborate on the veracity of that statement. My best guess is that she chose not to because she doesn’t know what Separatism is, or can be, as a real force for women‘s freedom across the board.

When I was a kid back in the 1970s, I sat at kitchen tables where women spoke of lesbian/feminist separatist communities in the hills, I saw them putting together events like Michfest (in fact, one of the very first women’s music festivals was held at Sacramento State University where my mom was a student), I was welcomed into homes where only females were allowed.  As a rule. I was exposed to many different ways to be feminist, be separatist, to be by (and for) ourselves.

Along the way, during the late 80s and early 90s, the years in which I lived, worked and engaged in PIV with men, what I knew about separatism sort of faded away and morphed into a vague disdain for *lesbians who couldn’t handle the real world*.  I’m ashamed sometimes for having felt that way, but I also understand how it happened; I had become male-identified even though I was a feminist and politically active. Or put more simply, I was a Liberal Feminist. It was the medical necessity of my second abortion that, in hindsight, really set me back on the track to re-membering my self and my kind.

Fast forward about 15 years to 2008: after a number of ups and downs (biggest up, The Kid – biggest down, a matter of days away from homelessness more than once) our secure-ish footing had been reestablished and I had the luxury of time to devote to my avocation of relaxed observation of life through the feminist lens. What I saw with my more mature, tested and tired eyes was that men had not changed at all, that in fact things had become much, much worse with the full-on mainstreaming of pornography in pop culture, male transexuals legally claiming beds in women-only shelters, prostitution being called “sex work” et cetera, ad nauseum. It came as a shock to me that there were women who were embracing it all and calling it Empowering and Egalitarian.

At this same time, in addition to working for our growing home-based small business, we were caring full-time for my partner’s very elderly male parent. It was difficult to deal with him every single day (dull, conservative, military, entitled, bigoted, abusive, blah, blah) but on Thursdays, after breakfast was served, I made a point of not seeing him for a full 24 hours. It became “Dude-Free Thursday“.

But, one of those Thursdays I had a dentist advise me that I would be wise to cap my teeth in order to “get a husband”. One of those Thursdays an emergency gyn exam turned into a lecture about how I must tell my “boyfriend” about my HPV “condition” lest said boyfriend be “infected”. Yet another Thursday, a former neighbor’s father thought it perfectly normal to hug me on sight, on the sidewalk in front of my house, because I had once hired him to do some emergency plumbing. Another neighbor, whom I’d never even been introduced to, just walked into our living room one Thursday looking for his daughter. Another Thursday a checker at the grocery gave The Kid a quarter and told her she was a good girl.

And I began to notice that Dude-Free Thursday wasn’t really dude-free at all, so I set out to see if I could find a way to make it that way.

The Kid and Maude McMoocan

First, you need to know why we have a valid reason for being concerned about the behavior of self-identified feminist men within feminist spaces, and our answer is simple: We have identified the subtle mechanisms utilized by pro-feminist men to “divide and conquer”, to erase the commonality from all women within feminist spaces and whose cumulative effect results in a gross marginalization of the radical feminist position. Nor are we are the only women to notice a problem. Megan Milanese brilliantly describes most of the tactics here — yet that list does not go far enough to analyze the extent of the problem.

So why should an erasure of the commonality inherent to all women matter to anyone besides radical feminists? Lucky Nickel makes the relevant connection for us:

Self-naming and self-identified labels mean nothing. There must be substance to the label they identify with and substance to who they claim to be. Otherwise folks can insist on calling a mouse a giraffe or claim rape is really love.

What I do think important to note is that liberals, lesbian separatists and radical feminists are all flying the radfem flag these days. The problem being, they are 3 separate and distinct political groups and ideologies, 2 of whom are inappropriately waving the radfem flag. It can get a bit tricky tho with lesbian separatists as radical feminists can also be lesbian separatists. But not all lesbians are radfems and not all radfems are lesbian separatists, or even lesbian for that matter. But in Julian Real’s case, that would be irrelevant. The dude is not a lesbian or radical feminist.

What the dude is, is liberal. And what he is attempting to do is appropriate the radical feminist label in order to inject liberal ideology. Equality politics are liberal politics, not radical feminist politics. Radical feminists seek liberation from men and their system, not equality. Liberals focus on differences between women. Radical feminists focus on the commonality of women. Needless to say, these 2 different ideologies conflict and clash. Which delights men like Julian Real to no end. Cuz if he keeps liberal women pitted against radical feminist women, it keeps women from unifying, which in turn keeps the heat off of pricks like him and men in general. Slick, no?

In talking to each other privately, we have decided to collectively communicate the following message regarding Julian Real, Hugo Schwyzer, and other men like them who claim to be feminist allies. These men do not speak for women as well as we can speak for ourselves and we ask that you give radical feminist bloggers the respect of reading our words, joining the discussion in comments on our blogs, and contributing to our own community rather than giving energy to men like Julian & Hugo who seek to divide us on points which all feminists have in common. Men exhibiting these behaviors have inserted themselves into discussions among women when their participation was insidiously harmful in nature, and we ask that you not support that behavior nor make excuses for it.

I think there is something that you should know about my life just in case this *middle-class white women think they own feminism* has anything at all to do with me. Because frankly it seems odd timing that you bring up race with me shortly after I privately introduced myself as a middle-aged white woman. Maybe I’m paranoid but since I’ve been through this many, many times over the years I’d like to get it straight with you and the community-at-large now…

Having no personal choice in the matter of the hue of my skin at birth, nor the circumstances of my parents’ economic status, the result was that I was born female, *white* and middle-class. Because my mom was a feminist activist in the 70s, I was raised hanging out with a wide variety of women from every kind of background imaginable and I’ve been witness to all the varieties of quilt tripping about race/economic/academic/sexual orientation privileges there are when it comes to Feminism on the ground (and now on the internet); it’s so *classic* it should be trite.

My partner is Korean, the offspring of a prostituted woman and abandoned on the streets of Inchon. Her name and language were taken from her when she was adopted at 8 and flown half way around the world by an elderly amerikan military officer and his wife. He was, and is, a pedophile. Add to it that she is, and always has been, a butch (looking) Lesbian and I think she pretty much has all the Oppression Olympics bases covered. Also our daughter (conceived by anonymous sperm donor and my organs) is a girl of color, also Asian.

So, what does that make me?

A white woman who loves two females of color more than any other people on planet Earth. Every single other female on planet Earth comes in a very close *second* though.  It makes no difference to me what color their skin is, how much money they (or their men) have, how much education they‘ve been lucky enough (thanks to feminists) to avail themselves of or even if they‘ve done awful and cruel things. Because, in the end, all of those *markers* are man-made, man-dictated, man-approved/non-approved, man-owned and operated and females of all walks of life are doing the best they can to get by with what crumbs they’ve been allowed to have.

Which brings me to compassion. Yes, it can be extremely difficult to have compassion for females, all females; almost no one is modeling the behavior.

As women we are groomed to always think of men first because it’s our *job* and when we don’t we are attacked and threatened not only by men, but usually by other women which can be personally painful, but understandable given our circumstances. As a very personal example: I no longer maintain a relationship with my mom because when I tried to explain to her – we were talking about “porn-culture” at the time - that my brother is a bondage fetishist and addicted to violent pornography so much so that he believed that he could talk his way into fucking me in my own home at the age of 24 (he was 30), she blamed me in a lightning-quick, knee-jerk reaction.  She attempted to apologize by saying that my brother had “betrayed” me. My mom, the Feminist Activist.

So when I see an obviously bright, talented and compassionate woman, especially a feminist who is in the business of counseling women who are trying to heal, say something like *I’d side with a man of color over a white woman any day* to a public feminist audience, I die a little.

I really do.

Peace be with us all.

Have a Happy Solstice and a Serene New Year.

“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

without even bothering to maybe suggest that it’s horrific to think that there IS A NEED for a 10 or 11 year-old female child to be buying emergency contraceptive medication INSTEAD OF bubble gum and that if a little girl is looking for this product then probably her “parents” are maybe not all that interested in and/or unable to protect her well-being in the first place and THEN do the FEMINIST work of demanding the nation seriously consider what might be done to eradicate this need, I’ve decided to post this video instead:

http://youtu.be/LrvJ2bsFduY

Debbie if you run into this (and I hope you do), I was the little curly-haired girl who used to play in the long jump pit at practice way back then. I always admired you for your kick, but today I admire you more for your strength.