Women Hold The World Under Their Tongues

What they were saying to me was very clear. As long as any male, anywhere is suffering, women are selfish to mention that they are suffering, too.

I'm sure neither of those men realized the woman-hatred behind their feeling that everything and everyone should come before women. I pointed out quietly that in every country where children are starving, women are starving also. In every country where men are being tortured, women are being tortured also. I was insensitive enough to point out that Vietnam is also strewn with the blasted bodies of women, and that many, many of those bodies were not simply blown up, but were also sexually abused-raped, gang raped, used up in prostitution, tortured. No matter when or where or what men suffer, women's suffering is on some totally different, more exquisite, plane.

But no one wants to hear that women are suffering. Men's ordeals are recounted and described and depicted in every conceivable way in every medium on earth, and have been from earliest history. We are always asked and expected to look at and listen to and understand and sympathize with men's pain and suffering, and we have always done it, all of us, men and women. But women's agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable, and the jig would be up.

That this might indeed happen is terrifying to most people. It would stand the whole world on its head. This is why any time women say, "Look at what is happening to us!" someone invariably rises up on the spot (as patriarchy has trained us all so well to do) and shouts, in order to divert us, to frighten us, to remind us of our vulnerability and danger: "But what about men?"

I explained to the distraught man whose buddies lie in fragments all over the corpse of Vietnam: ''You are performing this function here tonight. May I interrupt this well-rehearsed performance to point out that we have given men 5000 years of undivided attention." (Is it any wonder they have remained spoiled little boys?) As Pauline Bart points out: "We are not allowed, even now, to speak of women's suffering without someone saying, 'and men, too,' although we have always spoken of men's suffering without adding 'and women, too!'" Patriarchy has worked hard to make women's experience appear so trivial and so invisible that it is inconceivable to most people that we warrant any attention at all. Otherwise, it would not be so maddening to them to have to listen for a whole hour to a speech about women, though they listen willingly day after day, year after year, to talks by and about men. For many hundreds of years they have heard about nothing but men: their wars, their ideas, their art, their politics, their science, their blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam."

in this context, bloodlines gain importance, both as a way to accumulate wealth (the more kids you have, the more laborers you have for your farm, for example) and as a way to establish inheritance of that wealth. this means there’s an incentive for men to have power over their descendants, and in order for them to achieve that, they must control reproduction. how do they control reproduction if they’re not the ones giving birth? by controlling women. there’s no paternity tests, how do you ensure a kid is yours? by punishing women who have multiple sexual partners. how do you make women more vulnerable and thus easier to control? by getting them pregnant and making sure they can’t abort. how do you ensure the mother of your children doesn’t just run away with your kids? by making it impossible for women to own property and making them dependent on a man. a woman is infertile and can’t give you children? she must be worthless. and so on and so forth.

But I already knew it was good. Everyone had watched it and raved about it.

No one talked about the pedophilia, though. Spoilers.

The story starts with a college student in love with a high schooler that he is mentoring offering a job to his friend so that he will protect the high schooler while he is gone abroad. His friend is the mastermind of the story and quickly falls in love with the high schooler as well. The high schooler seems to be into it, which is messed up because she is a child and of course she thinks it is flattering when an older man says he likes her better than an adult woman.

Now, this is a subplot, but I've been trying to think about how it fits into the themes of the story. From face value, it seems that the poor young man is the parasite because he hopes to one day inherit the big home and the rich family that he is currently conning. The story goes out of its way to show how the wealthy family is instead the parasite in every instance, so I wonder how this teenage girl getting preyed on is the parasite.

I would argue that this time, the young man is, without a doubt, the parasite. Not because he wants to inherit a large home and tons of wealth, but because he is stealing away a girl's affection, shaping her perception of the world, and doing it under the guise of mentorship. The true shame is that his attachment to the girl is what saves him. He was bleeding out from a head wound with serious brain trauma, but she found him and carried him away from the scene of murder, saving his life.

While I have no doubt that after the events of the film the girl was never allowed to contact the young man again, if they had been undiscovered, we can only speculate what would have happened to her.

1. he will clean the house, the public spaces, the common areas, the work spaces, and anywhere a woman may tread fully, with complete competence, so that it is hygienic and sanitary and nice to look at and pleasant to be around, without any expectation that a woman or any woman will assist

2. he will not consume any material classified as media that depicts women, fictional or real, in positions, sexual or not, of humiliation, torture, bodily harm, pain, torment, dehumanization, commodification, or death, made for the express purpose to tantalize, titillate, or arouse an audience of males, and he will not masturbate to the thought of it.

3. he will expect no children, no marriage, no servitude or attention from any woman, and will not expect any woman to forego her own health and safety to uplift his quest for legacy and import, nor will he expect her to prioritize him and his goals, his desires, or needs over her or another woman’s, rather he will when possible prioritize her own self-fullfilment and self-actualization without her asking.

4. he will not rape.

5. he will murder rapists. he will not punish a woman who murders a rapist, but indeed he will try his best to spare her the pain by murdering the rapist for her. when a woman murders a rapist, he will aid in uplifting the woman in the community in announcing and celebrating her good deed. he will expect no same approval and distinction, and will do his work quietly and unassuming. He will find no pleasure in the act and expect no reward, not least which from the rapist’s victims.

6. he will speak when spoken to by a woman. he will otherwise cast his eyes down, and make no act or sound to gain her attention. he will be thankful for any attention a woman deigns to give him, and he will not expect any attention further than she gives.

7. he will disown any god, all gods, and take no interest in the pursuit of godliness. the matters of theology will only be discussed, known, and understood by women, and he will have no desire taking part. he will not listen, he will not concern himself. he will not argue with a woman about the affairs of gods and spirituality.

8. he will labor graciously to provide a world that fosters the health and imagination of women, with no expectations for his own rewards.

9. he will not wage war, he will not fight in a war.

In a previous post, I argued that the origin of misogyny is men’s ability to impregnate (and their inability to be impregnated). This gives them a unique ability to harm women in a way that women cannot harm men–and this ability, if exploited, gives them a unique power over women that women can never impose on them.

However, I think women’s ability to be pregnant, while an obvious vulnerability, is also a great source of power. Women have the ability to create a human eye, a human brain, human consciousness; the ones naturally endowed with the ability to decide who lives and who dies. So while the ability to become pregnant is a vulnerability, it is also a great power.

And men know that. So to “steal” the power of life and death from women, they rape women and pass abortion bans. By doing so, they can wrestle control over women’s bodies and thus control over the production of humanity itself.

In other words, men’s inability to be impregnated is a source of both superiority and inferiority. Their inability gives them a unique protection that women do not have, and so they can never face a particular kind of horror that women face; however, their inability to become pregnant also means they are biologically less significant than women. The human race would continue if there was just one man on earth, but not if there was just one woman. In other words, men are disposable; women are not.

The idea that misogyny comes from socialization is circular logic. Misogyny comes from misogynistic laws and religions? Who made the laws? Who made the religions? How is it possible that women were  socialized to be subservient to men in so many cultures, even ones that had no previous contact with each other?

However, the idea that misogyny comes from men’s nature is also flawed. Yes, men’s hatred of women is extremely common, as previously established, yet it is not completely universal. There have been matriarchal societies. And in our day-to-day interactions with men, we do notice differences between men based on how they were raised and their respective day-to-day environments.

So what is the root of misogyny, if it’s not men’s socialization or men’s nature? 

I think a more useful way of understanding misogyny (and honestly all forms of oppression) is not to focus on socialization or nature but on ability.

Men have a unique ability to harm women in a way that women cannot harm men. Men can impregnate women. Women cannot impregnate men. On top of having this unique ability, men also have major incentives for doing it: by impregnating a woman, they receive pleasure and a lineage. Unlike women, they also run such a small biological risk for producing a child. After having their orgasm, nothing else is biologically required from them. At worst, they might get an STD.

You might argue that some men are gay or do not want children. That’s all very much true. However, I am not arguing that men have a natural impulse to use their ability. I am simply stating that they have the ability. It is also important to understand that men exist as a class, as well as individuals. While individual men might not even have the ability to impregnate (due to infertility), we can hopefully understand that men as a class have this ability.

If it helps, we can think of this unique ability like a gun. Half of the population is born with a gun (ability to impregnate)  and a bullet-proof vest (inability to be impregnated); the other half is born with neither. The ones born with the gun and the bullet-proof vest  are not necessarily born with a natural impulse to fire the gun–but they are nonetheless born with one.

Even if a man never hurts someone with the gun, I want you to imagine how his psyche is formed just by virtue of having it. Imagine walking into a room with a gun and a bullet-proof vest, and no one else in the room has either. Even if you would never use the gun…just having one gives you a sense of protection, and perhaps a sense of superiority and power. Even if you would never use your tacit threat, you nonetheless have a tacit threat. And now imagine the psyche of those without the gun or the vest. They are vulnerable, and know that they are vulnerable, to the ones who do have one. And so their options are to either appease those with guns and vests, always tip-toeing around them–or to band together.

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Some say that gender-neutral language is not sexist, nor does it erase women. Here are some examples that prove otherwise, revealing the bias for women, and not men, to surrender linguistic boundaries.

(I’ve been collecting examples since I made this post. Thanks to all who submitted! I will keep adding on.)

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