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Fuck Politeness

“This is a revolution, not a public relations movement”

Tag Archives: prison

February 2, 2009 No, I don’t think I *will* cheer on the ‘big boys’ thanks

A few things up my nose today:

The calls for ‘stick him in prison and let the *big boys* take care of him’  response to the father who threw his daughter off the bridge.

You’ve read my blog, don’t even come at me with ‘OHHH so you’re EXCUSING this sort of thing?’.

You KNOW I am absolutely not.

But no one actually knows what happened here. He may have been yet another father/husband who decides ‘if you’ve left me, kiss your kids goodbye’. It may have been violence and control. But it may equally have been mental illness.

Obviously the child is still dead either way. This reminder is not about ‘culpability’.

Masculinity produces all sorts of violences. Against men, women and children. In my opinion women and children bear the brunt of it in the end. But masculinity inflicted and continues to inflict its own violences upon men to produce subjects for whom control and domination is so important.

It doesn’t negate personal responsibility for choice and action, but our culture is so sick that it’s killing people. And vengeance is not going to stop that.

The prison system itself is highly flawed if reformation or societal protection are its goals, and the demands for harsher sentences are symptomatic of a bloodthirsty call for vengeance with little understanding of what prompts violent crimes, what might help stop them, what gaol time is really like.

And please, if you’re going to use the ‘let the big boys sort them out’ mentality, get the fuck off my blog.

Gang rape is ok now if its meted out in the name of righteous vengeance? Fuck off with your ignorant self!

I do not know what happened in this man’s life, I do not know what he was thinking when he did what he did. In many respects it doesn’t matter. A child is dead. A mother is greiving. Brothers are in shock and may never recover.

But HOW, please tell me HOW is it going to make anything better for anyone for him to be gang raped?

And WHAT sort of person are you if you’re cheering it on? What sort of society are you cheering on?

There are times in which I wish that rapists could *know* the fear and degradation of their victims. But rape is wrong. Flat out wrong. Like torture, you don’t utilise it when you think it might ‘help’ or for vengeance or punishment.

If you want the sort of society that doesn’t torture, doesn’t rape, doesn’t murder, then YOU DON’T DO IT and you don’t cheer it on.

Fuck.

Also – since WHEN did we decide that those imprisoned for violent crimes were society’s righteous avengers? These are people who’ve robbed banks at gunpoint, who’ve raped, who’ve beaten up their wives, who’ve beaten the crap out of strangers – excuse me if I don’t trust them to decide who needs a good gang-raping to ‘sort them out’.

It seems to me to go back to our worship of the masculine man. The worship of the Michael Corleone’s or the Chopper’s – those men who go by their internal rules and who dish out ‘justice’ and don’t let the law dictate their limits. We’re so goddamned hungry to throw ‘bad people’ in to be brutalised by these guys that it seems we think lawless men do after all have a higher moral code than the law, than society.

A related thought. I’m sick of people assuming that my feminism means I think women are superior to men, that they’re infallible and their behaviour is always excusable, or that men’s behaviour occurs in a vacuum and we can hold just the individual responsible and not the culture.

I’m sick of it being assumed that I care nothing for men’s experiences. Apart from my capacity for human empathy, I have a son. What masculinity may do to this lovely kid with a heart full of love terrifies me. Men and women police the boundaries of sex, gender, sexuality constantly, to the detriment of all…

It’s true that I think a large part of the problem lies in the construction and maintenance of masculinity (and the inevitably concurrent construction and maintenance of femininity which masculinity needs to eschew in order to define itself) – the argument ‘Oh men beat up and kill men more than they beat up/rape women’ doesn’t make gender equity real, it just makes it more evident how fucking fucked up and violent masculinity can be.

But for fuck’s sake. Why does pointing this out/wanting to look at it closely translate into man hating/women worshipping/dogmatism? That attitude? I’m not responsible for that, if you think it, it’s because *you’re* the fool who hasn’t questioned your own attitudes properly.

Anyway. I’m at work, I oughta do something I’m paid for now.

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October 25, 2007 The “shrew” is not yet tamed, I think

Well fuck me rigid masculinity pisses me off sometimes!!!

I’ve been in a bit of a grump about the state of the world all week, so it’s a kind of cumulative rage that possesses me today. But I do get very sick of living in a world that gets defined by men, for men. This morning I woke up, and for some self punishing reason, decided to see what Arsehole de Brito had to say about the world. WHY oh WHY do I do it to myself? Worse still I clicked on the comments section! MMMMMMfuckityfuckityfuckinfuckincunts!

Seriously, it’s such a self serving community of bigoted women-haters…they’d argue with that and say they *love* women. I’d counter that they love access to pussy on the condition it’s not too old, is perfectly groomed and comes attached to a conventionally gorgeous and compliant but perky young woman. Also, said pussy has to be available on demand, but not have too many demands of its own, else it gets labelled a “slut”. And in all of this, who makes the calls on defining women? Men. Men just stating ‘facts’, just ‘observing’ truths.

 What was the article about? About a bitch of an old woman having a go at her husband on the beach (oh if ONLY my job was to take one little glimpsed interaction and to spin it out into a full length sound off with no rules about how my article should actually be thoughtful/insightful/a genuine attempt to engage with the issues). The article then touched on male rape in prisons (oh so delightfully referred to as ‘man love’ – love/rape…one of these things is not like the other, right?), concluding that there was none of this happening in the particular prison setting as the guys are 18-21. Clearly then rape would never be an issue.

It was a bit of a diatribe on men needing to grow balls in the face of nagging, gnashing, petty high-strung women. NOW – let me go on the record to say I cannot stand watching two people nag/shout at each other or treat each other poorly in any way. Not defending this behaviour. But an isolated incident turned into a diatribe on Sam’s favourite topic – how men need to grow bigger kahunas in setting boundaries on their women, or their women will run all over them. It’s a bit of a theme for him. Women it appears are quite like children (which is possibly true of the women Sam likes to shag) – if you don’t show them where the limits are they will run riot on a grown up version of the sugar high, and before you know it, your life will be reduced to ruins by a full-scale, adult sized Veruca Salt. Put your foot down Sam, show em whose da boss.

 Anyway, whatever right? Just another fuckwit with a keyboard. But what happens every freaking time is that it becomes a hate fest over women and their maniacal, hysterical ways, the fact they’ll screw you within an inch of your lives if you let em, they’re shrews, harridans, they wanna trap you into marriage and babies, take your money and make you miserable. Poor, poor men. Generalisations are flying around so thick and fast that if you aren’t careful you’ll lose an eye. Now. I do not have a problem with someone observing the behaviour of people in public and then examining it. But in order to examine it, you would need to put some genuine thought into what’s going on. These articles are never truly about resolving these issues and making peoples lives happier, they are about tapping into deep seated bitterness and anger towards women, about reinforcing stereotypes in ways that make people feel good for “knowing” stuff about life. So when it results, every freaking time into a disgusting display of bigotry – then I have a problem with it.

 I’m so sick of being told not to worry about this – I mean I get it. On the one hand, blah blah, be the bigger person, he’s an idiot, not to worry…but, he has access to publication in a mainstream newspaper’s website, he preaches to the masses and the ‘masses’ lap it up. Bigotry towards women is everywhere in society, in its extreme forms, and in ‘jokes’ and song lyrics and leers and generalisations. Why is it that I should just say “water off a duck’s back”? I’m no duck, I’m a woman, and I live in a world where there is appalling levels of violence and hate directed at women, and I’m supposed to put up and shut up?

Well, no. I mean, yeah, I have my own blog. Big deal though, what twenty ppl read me a day? It’s hardly turning the tables on the Sam de Brito’s of the world. To say ‘ignore it’, to say ‘start your own blog’ is all well and good, except it ignores the fact of the institutionalised nature of discrimination against women. It’s gonna take way more than a blog to redress that. But apparently it ain’t cool for me to say I’m a feminist, to be angry. I’m supposed to say I live in a “post-feminist” world. All cos of Ally McFuckinBeal. I’ll tell you what? You men who say I’ve got ‘no sense of humour’, I’m ‘too angry’, etc…go out and do something yourselves to ensure that women can walk the streets safely, that they will no longer be beaten, that they can choose if and how and when they would like to procreate, that they can make choices about how to support and care for their families, that they can define their desires and sexuality for themselves, that they can access equal incomes and high positions in the workplace. I’ll sit back and observe, and then I will happily talk about our post-feminist world and laugh at every shitty joke you tell me.

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