What constitutes Misogyny?

[Stephen Morgan]

Is that meant to be a woman? What's abslinenten mean?

[JackRiddler]

Is that meant to be a woman? What's abslinenten mean?

Oh god no. The heroic worker is breaking an almost as heroic liquor bottle. It's the German Abstinence party, late 19th century, famous for its other posters saying, "ARBEITER - MEIDET DEN SCHNAPS" (Workers! Avoid Schnaps!) Schnaps being not just that fun licorice liquor but heavy liquor in general.

Sorry. Back to topic, now.

[Canadian_watcher]

yeah Jack come on..... I believe we were talking about otters

[Peregrine]

It's like direct marketing, it doesn't have to work on many people, as long as it works on one or two it's profitable.

Yeah. I do sorta have an urge to join some new age neo-tantric cult, now that you mention it...

Stephen:

I just wanted to assess people's reaction, as they won't let this thread die.

Yeah, I sorta resurrected the thread a little, because I wanted to give you a blaring example of pay inequality I experienced personally specifically because of my gender.

Don't let me stop you.

Gee willikers. Thanks for your understanding. Empathy for a gal in this situation is -SURPRISE!- obviously not your strong suit.

Seems you might not be comfortable with it shrinking into the back pages of GD? You want it to die? Oh well. Rock on...

No comprende.

Um, I gathered you weren't thrilled with the thread, hence your comment on how it "won't die". Comprende?

[Peregrine]

yeah Jack come on..... I believe we were talking about otters

well, since you mentioned otters. These guys are way cute. And have kept me getting my hackles up...

[Canadian_watcher]

yeah Jack come on..... I believe we were talking about otters

well, since you mentioned otters. These guys are way cute. And have kept me getting my hackles up...

As I told my SO last night: otters are my 'go-to' animal.

[Stephen Morgan]

It's like direct marketing, it doesn't have to work on many people, as long as it works on one or two it's profitable.

Yeah. I do sorta have an urge to join some new age neo-tantric cult, now that you mention it...

You think direct marketing doesn't work? You think they all do it for fun?

Stephen:

I just wanted to assess people's reaction, as they won't let this thread die.

Yeah, I sorta resurrected the thread a little, because I wanted to give you a blaring example of pay inequality I experienced personally specifically because of my gender.

Don't let me stop you.

Gee willikers. Thanks for your understanding. Empathy for a gal in this situation is -SURPRISE!- obviously not your strong suit.

I don't even know what your situation is, how can I have empathy? That's why I say don't let me stop you being more specific.

Seems you might not be comfortable with it shrinking into the back pages of GD? You want it to die? Oh well. Rock on...

No comprende.

Um, I gathered you weren't thrilled with the thread, hence your comment on how it "won't die". Comprende?

Still not getting it.

[OP ED]

But they don't really mention anything about women.

sort of odd, yes.

OP ED wouldn't ever sign its name to anything so flimsily crafted and self-centered.

[except tax documents]

...

Yeah. I do sorta have an urge to join some new age neo-tantric cult, now that you mention it...

i know a couple of people who are enrolling "students".

but, sigh, and jesus. if you're going to go all cosmic, you could at least let the source material speak for itself.

Woman is the Creator of the Universe,
the Universe is her form;
Woman is the foundation of the World,
she is the true form of the body.
Whatever form she takes,
whether the form of a man or a woman,
is the superior form.
In woman is the form of all things,
of all that lives and moves in the world.
There is no jewel rarer than woman,
there is not, nor has been, nor will be
any destiny to equal that of a woman;
there is no kingdom, no wealth
to be compared with a woman;
there is not, nor has been, nor will be
any holy place like unto a woman.
There is no prayer to equal a woman.
There is not, nor has been, nor will be
any yoga to compare with a woman.
No mystical formula, nor ascetism
to match a woman.
There is not, nor has been, nor will be
any riches more valuable than woman.
[Saktisangama Tantra]

OP ED couldn't really sign off on this either. A bit too over the top, really. OP ED tries not to come across as trying to get laid, especially when it is trying to get laid. Which is always.
Maybe something more contemporary and closer to my own [a]moral and [non]spiritual path:

"Sat at a sandwich bar in Westminster, I meet the sharp, South-London wideboy occultist that I'd created some years previously for a U.S. comic book. He looks at me, and smiles, and walks away. Years later, in another place, he steps out from the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: 'I'll tell you the ultimate sercret of magic. Any cunt could do it.'"
[Alan Moore, from Snakes & Ladders]


---

[OP ED]

But really, as interesting and important as this topic is to OP ED, it has learned too often that these threads rarely do more than teach us about our brother and sister posters. OP ED has a serious problem with these situations. OP ED doubts that it will ever have any more than the most general intellectual grasp of what the actual experience of being feminine is like in our world. OP ED cannot really understand. It is incapable of apologizing for its misunderstandings. Not that this would help if it could. It can, for example, agree with the comments of one self-identifying-as-female-poster who pointed out that the S-I-A-F-Ps here seem to have trouble being recognized as qualified to make certain judgements, often to the point of their self-described-life-experiences being questioned as having ever even happened. Whereas OP ED routinely gets away with referring to itself in the third person. This is obvious to OP ED. It could make a list of these happenings, having been watching for them ever since becoming aware, but this list would be as long as this thread.

OP ED cannot stop sexualizing females and/or viewing them as sexual objects. Nothing short of death seems capable of inhibiting the stimulating processes of OP ED's terrible terrible flesh and mind. However, OP ED would like to see the end of commercial exploitation of OP ED's tendencies in this regard. [and the females therein]

Being in this coffee shop is bad enough for my brain. they could at least take the slim and fit but oh so boring "models" off these espresso ads. (like you have to sell caffiene)

[in this sense however, it is still somewhat unreality to OP ED, just another item on the list of things in this world which are urgently in need of being undone and then rebalanced in order to make it into a place where OP ED can feel comfortable in its own skin]

Misogyny is ubiquitous. A Systemic Bias. Programmed into this computer, this website, this coffee shop, these streets, these suburbs, these genes. OP ED cannot escape it, often cannot see it for its overwhelming presence.

How shall OP ED make war on the world?

[Stephen Morgan]

“Since femaleness suffuses the created world, the pure male is cast out. He has no right to life.” — Camille Paglia

I'd quite like to know, while I'm here, what the feminists here would do if they could. If they were, say, in power in a Parliamentary government with control over the executive and legislative apparatus of the state. If one were to accept the hypothesis that women are an oppressed class there would presumably be policies to be followed and laws enacted which could help reverse this situation.

We can see what happens with actual feminists in power in this documentary, from Sweden, from before the Assange business, with the silly rape law and the CIA hunting wikileaks and all that business:


A good documentary, shows clearly that feminism is a hate movement, particularly when the documentary maker, a woman, is told that if she is ever abused she won't be allowed into any of the ROKS(government backed association of women's shelters)-affiliated shelters. Got herself onto a Nixonian enemies list. Can't have done much for her career either. Another revealing bit is when one of the ROKS bigwigs approves a quote used in ROKS literature from Valerie Solanas, the one about men being nothing more than mechanical dildoes, and she seems surprised the documentary maker, Rudin, doesn't agree. As if she'd never encountered dissent before.

The documentary boils down to four issues: the influence of ROKS on the government; the use of this influence to corrupt academia; the use of this influence to corrupt lawmaking, including the only interview with a man I remember from the whole doc, specifically the elimination of the option of treatment for domestic violence perpetrators; and, the kidnap of a young woman who had been a victim of sexual abuse and the attempt to force her to claim she had been a victim of SRA (which Rudin, as a member of the liberal media, doesn't believe in) by keeping her locked up in a place in Norway (the police refused to prosecute the ROKS women responsible).

So not bad, on the whole, but still bares a number of feminist marks. For example on the domestic violence issue, no mention is even made of the possibility of female perpetrators or male victims, it's just assumed that all perps requiring treatment will be male. That sort of thing. A general background of feminism, as the whole of society is suffused with it.

Anyway, the feminists in power use their position to warp academia, intimidate and silence their opponents and prevent prosecution of their allies and lackies. Much like anyone else in power, to be honest, but I'd expect better of people here, feminist or not.

[Canadian_watcher]

Morgan,
when I have time I'll watch the doc, but for now I want to let you know my stance on feminism being a 'hate-movement.'

It is not surprising that there are some women who hate men and use the rules and regulations that feminism and the women's movement have fought to have put in to place (but who didn't put in to place) to their advantage and to seek power over men. There are twisted people of every gender. I disagree with those who seek power over, no matter who they are or what group they affiliate themselves to.

As you've said before, though, one cannot tar everyone in any group with the same brush - we are individuals and deserve to be treated as such.

[charlie meadows]

[Laodicean]

yeah Jack come on..... I believe we were talking about otters

[Allegro]

I must say, I thought I understood the way the world works. I do not understand the way the world works. I do not understand how so much injustice and nonsensical arithmetic can be abided by society.

REFER.

Lewis is a hero! On this page, Jeff introduced on October 19, 2007, Lewis’s 2006 speech in Toronto.

In the next comment space, you’ll see the pdf version of Lewis’s speech with some of his (relevant) statements highlighted. Lewis does not speak directly to misogyny; he points to it as one who is knowledgeable about political, psychosociological, and medical contexts of the AIDS pandemic in Africa.

Stephen Lewis | Extract of Final Address

See next comment space for the extract from speech.

[Allegro]

.
Follows is the extract, introduced ^^^ above, from that Final Address by Stephen Lewis to The Sixteenth International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, August, 2006. Here is the pdf that contains the entire speech; however, some of the pdf has been removed from the video presentation, which, as you’ll see, begins at the sixth paragraph on page four in the pdf. Highlights mine.

< extract begin >

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is still half a billion short this year and more than a billion short next year. At the moment, there is no obvious way to close the shortfall. It is almost inconceivable that the extravagant promises of Gleneagles are revealed as so fatuous that the Global Fund is now compromised. No one is asking for any more than that which was promised. But the Pavlovian betrayal of the South has already begun.

Everything in the battle against AIDS is put at risk by the behaviour of the G8. Yesterday, Dr. Julio Montaner characterized that behaviour as genocide. I remember back in 2001, in an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, I used the phrase mass murder. It’s hard, in the face of the annihilating human toll, not to be driven to linguistic extremes. This issue of resources makes or breaks the response to the pandemic. It is imperative that the delegates here assembled never let the G8 countries off the hook.

I want to say a strong word about human capacity.

What has clearly emerged as the most difficult of issues, almost everywhere, certainly in Africa, is the loss of human capacity. In country after country, the response to the pandemic is sabotaged by the paucity of doctors, nurses, clinicians and community health workers … the shortages are overwhelming. Everyone is struggling. Most of the shortage stems from death and illness; some stems from brain-drain and poaching. But whatever the source, we have a problem of staggering dimensions.

The capacity crisis illumines, more than anything else, what is needed. There are solutions: investment in the public sector and in extensive ongoing training can begin to fill the gap. But again it needs the donor community to uphold its responsibilities. And most important, the key to recovery lies at country level. The key to subduing the entire pandemic lies at country level.

What has to happen, I think, is that we place a temporary moratorium on the endless, self-indulgent proliferation of meetings, seminars, roundtables, discussion groups, task forces ad nauseam, plus the production of reports, documents, monographs, statistical data ad repetition, and concentrate every energy at country level.

At the opening of this conference, Peter Piot talked of the next twenty-five years. He’s right to do so. He indicated it would be a long and difficult haul; he’s right again. But if the next twenty-five years are to take advantage of the guarded optimism of this conference; if the next twenty-five years are to overcome the lethargy and inertia of the last twenty-five years; if the next twenty-five years are to link, inseparably, poverty and disease and the Millennium Development Goals, then it has to happen, in-country, on the ground, organized and orchestrated by the countries themselves.

And the agencies on the ground, whether multilateral, bilateral or civil society, must be held accountable. That’s what’s been missing. That’s the job of the delegates to this conference: holding people and organizations accountable. And that includes everything from the pharmaceutical companies that have been so intractable about prices of second-line drugs to bilateral trade agreements designed to deny access to generic drugs.

This 16th International AIDS Conference, beyond any preceding conference, has given voice to youth. But it’s still a limited and marginalized voice, reflecting the hostile ambiguity of the adult world. The figures are brutal and stark: fully fifty per cent of new infections between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. And yet who can deny the appalling absence of programmes for, and engagement of, young people in the fight against the pandemic. The situation cries out for redress … and it must be redressed well beyond smarmy tokenism.

Finally, in my view, as delegates doubtless know, the most vexing and intolerable dimension of the pandemic is what is happening to women. It’s the one area of HIV/AIDS which leaves me feeling most helpless and most enraged. Gender inequality is driving the pandemic, and we will never subdue the gruesome force of AIDS until the rights of women become paramount in the struggle.

Last Monday morning, at the women’s march, the signs read “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”. That was the slogan that captured the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights in 1993. It was the slogan repeated at the Cairo Conference on Population in 1994, and yet again at Beijing in 1995. It’s never been made real, and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power, it never will be real.

Whether it’s the apparatus of the United Nations, including the agencies, or the endless numbers of High-Level panels, or auspicious studies of human development like the Blair Commission on Africa, the demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident. And those examples are but proxies for the wider world, particularly the developing world, where freedom from sexual violence, the right to sexual autonomy, to sexual and reproductive health, social and economic independence, and even the whiff of gender equality are barely approximated.

It’s a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.

My closest colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that one of the ways to diminish the impact of the AIDS virus is by creating a powerful international agency for women, funded and staffed to the teeth. There must be voice and advocacy and operational capacity on the ground for fifty-two per cent of the world’s population. There is a UN reform panel at the moment, contemplating the creation of a new entity, provided they have the courage to confront the warped and abysmal gender architecture of the United Nations. If they find the courage, I deeply believe that we could begin to still the carnage.

And what works for AIDS can work everywhere.

I challenge you, my fellow delegates, to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honourable and productive calling. There is nothing of greater import in this world. All roads lead from women to social change, and that includes subduing the pandemic.

For my own part, when I leave my post of Envoy at the end of the year, I have asked that my successor be an African, but most important, an African woman.

< speech / extract end >