Wombaticus Rex wrote:I don't see the relevance of any of these topics to parapolitics and real history.
Hang tight Wombat! Unless I lost the plot, we're getting close to the very hub of
control:
ideology.
slomo wrote: Hence, the normalization of anti-feminism, which, yes, is a growing phenomenon, and I welcome it. BTW, it is a really cheap tactic to conflate anti-feminism with "woman-hating", because many women are anti-feminists, many men are feminists.
Not that slomo needs anyone to back him up, but I want to second this statement, at least the second part (I am not sure I would welcome the normalization of anything, unless maybe it's wisdom and compassion, and certainly not an anti-something).
If misogyny becomes synonymous with an anti-feminist position (and even apparently one that questions feminism), then what happens to the meaning of misogyny? It becomes diffuse, vague, and at the same time, all-encompassing, seemingly everywhere, a charge that can be leveled at anyone who disagrees or even questions the dominant ideology, until people are seeing "barrages of sexist comments" where there's barely a murmur of misogyny to be heard. And if a man can accuse a woman who disagrees with him of being misogynous ~ WTF? (Not that I've seen this happen here, just saying it's a logical progression of some of the arguments made here.) Meanwhile, behaviors and beliefs that may actually merit that description become harder & harder to identify.
Beyond this, misogyny as a type of prejudice, a pathology, and as a social injustice may be
a largely arbitrary category anyway, that is: if oppression, abuse, dehumanization, and violence are being inflicted on people everywhere of all ages, races, and sexes.
And they are. So repeat use of the term misogyny, besides being a way to ideological-police behaviors and opinions (and even to suppress or at least ignore facts), creates an arbitrary division between victims of abuse ~ which is all of us ~ whereby the suffering of one “class” (or sex) is seen as intrinsically more real and meaningful than another’s.
This may be reasonable when applied to children, because a) children can’t look after themselves and they are dependent on their adult caregivers, and especially vulnerable to abuse by them; b) the effects of abuse on a child’s psyche are immeasurably deeper and more lasting (and crippling) than the effects of abuse on an adult psyche.
No such difference can or should be applied to the sexes, most especially if we believe in sexual equality. To do so is not just hypocrisy,
it’s a travesty.Child abuse is not caused by misogyny, at least not exclusively or even primarily. Yet misogyny is almost certainly caused by child abuse. To talk about misogyny without talking about the abuse that has caused it (in many cases abuse
by women) creates an entirely false—and ideologically “loaded”—representation of the particular pathology that is hatred and violence directed against women.
This may be a bitter pill for some people to swallow, so here's some data to back it up (with a TRIGGER WARNING). I chose this because if there's one culture that pretty much
everyone agrees is misogynist, it's Arabic culture. But what no one seems to wonder about is how and why:
War leaders know the Killer Motherland group-fantasy that moves men to war, and repeat it endlessly before and during wars. . . .
Hitler’s conviction that he got his power from his mother was so literal that he kept pictures near his desks of both his actual mother, Klara, and of Medusa, whose gaze turned people into stone. Hitler said of the painting of Medusa, “They are the eyes of my mother!”17 Medusa was so deadly that one look from her could kill you. Hitler endlessly practiced before a mirror so his eyes would be killing “mother-eyes” like those of his own deeply depressed mother. Staring at his Nazi soldiers, Hitler could empower them also to be fused with the powerful Killer Mother, saying, “I want to see again in the eyes of youth the gleam of the beast!”
Islamic terrorists today regularly report their mothers brought them up to be a suicide bomber, a martyr, even picking which son should die and which must remain alive to support her in her old age.18 One mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber who had blown himself to bits told the reporter “with resolutely cheerful countenance,” “I was very happy when I heard. To be a martyr, that’s something. Very few people can do it. I prayed to thank God. I know my son is close to me.”19 Since he had been about to graduate from the university—that is, about to separate from his mother, to be independent, the mother felt she was about to “lose” him and preferred that he be “with” her in memory, and he himself felt “If I blow myself up and become a martyr, I’ll finally be loved by my mother.” They consciously think suicide will finally give them love from Allah, but they unconsciously think it will give them love from Mother.20All the other Killer Motherland devices mentioned above for warriors are paralleled in terrorists. Explosive devices to kill themselves and innocent civilians are called “Mothers of Satan.” In Gaza, a mother of three Hamas suicide bombers videotaped their paths to suicide, saying she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice rather than three, and was made famous as “The Mother of Martyrs.”21
Mothers often dress their little children in pretend explosives to encourage their suicide. Terrorists often drag themselves after being shot to their mothers, saying, “O my mother, I have been martyred,” or “You bore me to die.”22
Witnesses report that “When at last her son is martyred, she is said to be overjoyed to hear the news and emits a zaghrada (a high-pitched wailing sound made by women on happy occasions such as the entrance of a bride and groom at their wedding), sometimes even expressing the wish that all her sons will thus be taken.”23
What kind of mothers are these who not only tell their children they should commit suicide for Allah but let them watch daily TV messages in between cartoons that say they should kill themselves and even give them suicide belts to march around to practice their suicides?24 Like mothers everywhere, when they inflict abuse on their children they are simply repeating abuse that was committed on them when they were little girls. That terrorist cultures treat females horribly is well known. When a girl baby is being born, Islamist cultures traditionally dig a hole next to the birthing bed in case it is female and might be infanticided. A large majority of all girls in Islamist cultures are raped, and are even often blamed for their rape, since it is assumed that “those who don’t ask to be raped will never be raped.”25
Most girls have their genitals painfully mutilated around 6 years of age by their mothers, who as they chop off their clitoris and labia joyfully chant: “Today I am the master, for I am a man. Look—I have the knife in my hand…Your clitoris, I will cut it off and throw it away for today I am a man.”26 Genital mutilation is practiced by Islamist families from 40 countries; a recent survey of Egyptian girls and women, for instance, showed 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practiced female genital mutilation.27 As girls grow up they are treated as polluted beings, veiled, and routinely beaten by their mothers and husbands.28 It is no wonder that Physicians for Human Rights found that 97 percent of women they surveyed in Islamic areas suffered from severe depression.29
Such life-long painful physical and sexual abuse surely does not help a woman give love to her children; she passes on her beating, burning, cutting, kicking, and stabbing to the next generation.The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-orig ... otherland/
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
