YesAllWomen

The #YesAllWomen hashtag has generated a whole lot of online conversation since the mass killings by Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista, California on May 23, 2014.  What does #YesAllWomen mean?  It is in response to the fact that whenever brutal treatment of women makes headlines most men can and will truthfully respond by declaring that most men don’t beat, maim, overtly threaten and/or kill women.  However, all women suffer from the threatening climate that ensues for women when a minority of men does these things.

While it is true that Elliot Rodger killed more men in his shooting spree than women it seems men were collateral damage.  According to his internet postings it was women Rodger wanted to murder, women who he felt deserved to die because they didn’t seem to like him very much.  He killed women in his fantasies before he killed them in the flesh because he believed the power to kill is the ultimate power.  Sick?  Of course.  Highly unusual?  Not by far.  Ask the world’s militaries.

The entire world order runs on misogynistic violence.  World economics run on misogyny. Largely speaking, women are not paid as much as men anywhere.  Except in occupations where there are more women than men such as elementary school teachers and nurses, or the more esoteric research sciences’ when women can actually manage to get into these fields, women are paid less than men.  And women are never repaid as reproducers of the human race and the lifetime of work surrounding this unrelenting endeavor and it is not counted anywhere in the world as contributing to the GNP.  The love that most women bear for their children is actually used against them economically.

 In fact, other than bearing an heir to a parasitic European throne, women are penalized by the fact that they can and do reproduce.  Single mothers are scorned everywhere, especially if they are on welfare, and many married women are beaten and/or daily humiliated by their men, men who feel privileged  through custom and patriarchal religions to do so.  Which patriarchal religions?  All of them.  All patriarchal religions designate men as head of their houses with women playing a subordinate role.  Subordinates can safely be abused.  This skewed arrangement has cumulated in putting the earth itself in jeopardy and ruining the planet for everybody. How’s that?  Misogyny has caused all this plunder of the earth?

Misogyny is certainly the underlying cause.   Because practically all of the important economic decisions are made by men, the collective voices of women are rarely, if ever, heard.   Men are more attracted to violence than women, commit more violence, and have more compartmentalized brains.  Young men also tend to be hyper sexualized.   If one looks at the movies and games directed to young men, one doesn’t have to look far to see the connection between dominance, sex and violence.  Further add the sadistic misogyny played out in easily accessible porn sites.  However,  it is these  very values that so saturates our collective culture  because it is precisely  what  capitalism needs to grow and expand…the cheap and flexible availability of women in the labour force, the use of the female body in selling just about everything, including female bodies themselves, and the free labour of women in reproducing the labour force.

 How to keep women from demanding structural change to such an unbalanced society?  Corporations and world banks and militaries know what the drug cartels know…keep women fearful.  Keep them fearful of physical violence, for themselves and their daughters.  Keep women worried about economic survival for themselves and their children.  And if that fails, drug them.  There is plenty of liquor in the liquor stores, lot of illegal stuff on the streets, and an unending supply of pills in the pharmacy.  However, I don’t despair.

 I believe the time is rapidly approaching when women will be forced to come together in order to push for a more rational way of not only dividing up natural resources in a sustainable way, but in demanding a collective female voice in the struggle against violence, misogyny,  laissez faire capitalism; one that will welcome the embrace of collectivist thinking.  It has been capitalism’s worship of the individual as opposed to the collective that is driving us to extinction.   I personally sense that women are coming awake in ways they have never before and that our next change will be a big one.  For the better.  And women will be leading the way.

Producers and Reproducers

Producers and Reproducers

Yes, it was women who, aside from reproducing the human race also became the first producers.  The renowned US sociologist W.I. Thomas (1863-1947) wrote concerning the early life of women and men in what Evelyn Reed described in her famous book “Women’s Evolution”  as the Matriarchal Commune”…

“Men did the hunting and fighting.  He was attached to the woman but he was not steady.  He did not stay at home. The woman and the child were the core of society, the fixed point, the point to which man came back.  There consequently grew up a sort of dual society and duel activity.  Man represented the more violent and spasmodic activities, involving motion and skilled coordination, as well as organization for hunting and fighting, while woman carried on the steady, settled life…her attention was turned to industries, since these were compatible with settled and stationary habits.

And then Thomas goes on to describe these women centered activities…

“Agriculture, pottery, weaving, tanning, and all the industrial processes involved in working up the by-products of the chase, were developed by her.  She domesticated man and assisted him in domesticating the animals.  She built her house, and it was hers.  She did not go to her husband’s group after marriage.  The child was hers and remained a member of her group.  The germ of social organization was, indeed, the woman and her children and her children’s children.  The old women were the heads of civil society, though the men had developed a fighting organization and technique which eventually swallowed them up. (Sex and Society, pp. 227-29).

This version of early family groupings (called “exogamy” which means young people must mate or marry outside their own grouping) seems to be generally accepted by most anthropologists.  And if we look around at the global situation today we see that W.I. Thomas was also right about another thing…The fighting organizations and techniques that men have developed are indeed swallowing up the world big time. 

 And the women alive today are much the worse for it as are their children.  Even women in the developed world are losing ground as their work efforts are increasingly being made to pay for men’s war machines, and in many countries the children women have always tried to protect, are being killed and maimed by these guns, killing machines, and bombs developed and deployed by men.  The men who design and produce these destructive weapons grow grossly rich and stuffed with money while women, children and poorer men suffer and die.

The same male in-group attraction to aggression and assault also design and deploy dangerous weapons that are used against the earth to extract equally dangerous substances that continue to threaten our entire race to extinction. Under the cloud of this unspeakable threat women are struggling to become economically independent as producers in the market place on smaller wages, while fulfilling their biological role as reproducers of the human race, an activity that brings much debt along with great love. Women today stand as producers and reproducers while they get very little respect with even less decision making power. 

 To have a special day set aside to honour mothers seems almost an affront when male in-groups are still dictating to women how and what women can produce in the labour market, but even more tellingly, also how they can reproduce.  Both areas are rife with the outrageous disrespect and contempt for mothers that women live with every day.  I believe the day will come when there will no longer be a Mother’s Day (or Father’s Day) because respect for women (and men who rear children) will be built into society’s bones. In the meantime, a happy mother’s day to all mothers everywhere.

News on the Ebola virus?

News on the Ebola virus? Not from CBC. Or any other main stream news outlet on this continent that I know of. One has to look to foreign news outlets to even learn that a deadly outbreak of Ebola virus is even occurring in Ivory Coast, Guinea and now entering into Liberia and Sierra Leone. At least the National Geographic is forthcoming about the outbreak. On their web site (2014/04/28/ we learn… “Viral hemorrhagic fevers are perhaps the most feared and least understood of the emerging infectious diseases. …Mortality rates for Marburg (another hemorrhagic disease) and Ebola viruses are astoundingly high at 70 percent. ..Of all the hemorrhagic fevers, however, Ebola is the most feared. Health researchers all over the world are working hard to trace the origins of these viruses wherever outbreaks occur. It is extremely dangerous to residents and travelers alike, once it enters a population.” So why haven’t there been any advisories from the Canadian government on this deadly outbreak? Even the BBC is reporting on this and advising travelers to use caution if heading for these countries. What the hell is wrong with CBC? CBC’s international news is pathetic. It simply swallows whole any international propaganda (or lack thereof) coming from the US. Our federal politicians of all stripes are demonizing Russia and seem to become excited over the prospect of a World War Three in the same way as the religious right and Tea Partiers are in the States. They are, in my opinion, not only ignorant of Russian history, and of the region’s history in general, but crazy (I exclude Elizabeth May from this list).

I accuse the Harper government and the CBC of criminal negligence in not reporting this deadly Ebola outbreak that has killed hundreds of people in four different countries and is entering into the cities of these countries.

Ebola is highly contagious. It is lethal. In 1976 and 1995 Ebola killed 83 per cent of those infected in Zaire. Those were small areas and the virus was successfully contained, but even that infection was a huge battle requiring many resources. This time Ebola has already escaped into other countries. Why are Stephen Harper and the CBC deliberately exposing Canadians to this monstrous disease by withholding information?