Watch The Machine

Daly just died, many say they had no idea she promoted bigotry and hate. They say she’s done much good for “women” – they say at least she was not a “publicity hound”. She called herself a radical feminist and if you ask anyone in-the-know who are some other Radical Feminists they will tell you two names: MacKinnon and Dworkin.

MacKinnon is a lawyer and has a political science Ph.D .  She has no degree in “feminism” of any kind. MacKinnon is “not a liberal” and she is quite derisive of liberalism, and the “left” in general. She has argued for years against the right to privacy, asserting that it is a male-centric rape and abuse enabling “right” that hurts women.

Roe. v Wade was won on the grounds that it was in violation of a woman’s right to privacy to choose to terminate her pregnancy. And only a few years after that ruling, MacKinnon appears, an unknown “feminist lawyer” at anti-pornography hearings in the midwest- arguing for censorship and against the right to free speech because it protected abusers.

Going back a little further, Margaret Sanger won the right to distribute literature about birth control under the right to free speech.

Individuals have told us that free speech hurts women – they have gone to GREAT trouble to restrict any information about women and sex, over-riding the concerns of feminists everywhere, as a way to “protect women” from abuse. There is no difference between those people, and conservative christians who ascribe to the purity ball ideology. Women are vulnerable, and weak, and easily made victims of abuse.

They tell you it is for your benefit. You must open your eyes  – or close them instead – and imagine, just imagine what can happen if certain laws are put in place. If women are restricted in what they can and cannot do “because they are vulnerable”  – where do the restrictions end? Do you trust that the enforcers of such laws will be fair in applying them?

MacKinnon rails against “Man’s Law” and then fights to add things to that man’s law, and the things she adds are the very rights we just won.

The machine uses the words: RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE to scare the living shit out of everyone, and the result is we give up our rights to speech, privacy, choice, the very right to freedom.

That is RAPE CULTURE – it is the culture wherein the ruling class is able to control and monitor and direct and restrict and limit and jail and imprison anyone who disagrees. RAPE CULTURE is the culture that will result - is resulting – when people are convinced that they will be raped next. 

And here is where it leads,:

Once considered a purely private domain, rows between married or cohabiting couples could now prompt intervention from the state.

The French government wants to take the controversial step of introducing a new law banning “psychological violence” between married couples or partners living together.

….

Dr Hirigoyen suggested that recordings of phone calls could be used as evidence – along with medical and psychiatric assessments. 

and it says at the end of the article: 

“And the move is being welcomed by women’s groups.”

What women’s groups!!!??? What women’s groups support that?  Here is where we REALLY need some letter writing campaigns and where it REALLY matters that women have disavowed feminism in protest of the hate mongers that have claimed the right to speak for WOMEN – shit like this is still presented as being ok with the people who represent women’s concerns. It is not.This is the “media”, telling us;  me and you and every jr high school girl – that if you support WOMEN’S RIGHTS it means you support electronic surveillance.

 This crap gets framed as pro-woman over and over again, and while me, you, and ex-feminists know the truth, John and Jane Q. Public do not, and they will say around the dinner table – “It must be ok, if the feminists say it’s good for women, surely we have to trust the women’s groups to know what’s best for women.” And anyone who speaks out against it is branded an anti-feminist woman-hater.

Let’s call that out, demand the media report exactly WHICH “women’s groups”  support that. Damn sure as shit not ALL of them. And then lets demand the financials of those groups as surely we demand the financials of a corporation. THOSE are the laws that need to change.

That is what we have to do, we have to do it until even the most uninformed MRA’s ask “which women’s groups?” when they hear these things, instead of assuming we are of some huge hive mind. 

We can’t let this dividing and conquering continue.

There are feminists right now, you’ve read ‘em all over the place, if you follow feminism – during the Tiger Woods ordeal they were out there being radically contrary and arguing against privacy for the good of women.  

In august, when Jaycee Dugard was found – Pilgrim Soul on Harpyness wrote a post in essence advising that the right to privacy is bad – because if not for her captor’s right to privacy – then Jaycee would have been rescued. I don’t know if she did a follow up – there certainly isn’t an UPDATE to that entry, but when I last checked, not a single person on that thread had mentioned that Garido was on parole and HAD NO ACTUAL RIGHT TO PRIVACY.

PilgrimSoul argues that the police should have the right to go check – but THEY ALREADY HAD THE RIGHT! She glosses over, as surely as her heroine MacKinnon does, that the right is actually to be free of UNREASONABLE SEARCH. Where the concern should have focused on the failure of the law enforcement agency handling Garido – and where demands for investigation into inspection standards of parolee residences should have occured, instead there is a call to think about giving up certain freedoms, for the good of the less fortunate:

But even though I love my rights, I am not a card-carrying member of the ACLU.  I am not a First Amendment absolutist.  I think that the police should have the ability to investigate the backyards of people like Philip Garrido.  …   I do not think, in short, that the right to privacy and the right to live without state intrusion should extend to the right to rape women in your backyard undisturbed, “because that’s how you like to live.”

I think , in short, that there comes a point where “it’s a free country” becomes a weapon against rather than protection for the marginalized.  Legal guarantees of freedom are only useful for those who have the ability to get at the system, and when you think about it for more than twenty seconds, the people who have the easiest access to the system?  Are definitionally not the marginalized.   (note that PS is not marginalized at all, she is going to tell us marginalized folks that we deserve less rights – for OUR own good)

Rights have their natural limits in the degree to which they interfere with the well-being of other people, and of all people, the marginalized know this best.  Because as soon as they begin to suggest that their right to equal opportunity ought to be respected, and that more effort is needed to ensure they too enjoy the equal protection of the law, the powerful tell them it’s not “fair.”   (Hmmmm geeeeee, you mean like how so-called Radical Feminists like you do to Sex Workers of all races and backgrounds who ask that you go to the trouble of giving us PROFESSIONAL rights? Or is it only college graduates are allowed to make good money?)

So I think, as feminists, we have a responsibility to be skeptical of rights discourse.

I get a little confused when I see feminists thinking that rights are unqualified goods, given that they are defined and mostly wielded by the powerful in this society and have been used, in the last decade or so, as a tool to try and claw back programs like affirmative action or access to birth control under the aegis of “equality rights” and “freedom of religion.”

 

 She argues against the right to privacy, again ROE V. WADE was won on privacy, she does not mention that. Does she even know?
And:

DISCOURSE?!

I am so sick of this academic bullshit stalling tactic where they say shit like “I’m not against human rights for sex workers (ie women), I just think it’s more important to consider the social construction of gender and abuse and race and blah blah blah blah and it’s ok because see I ALREADY HAVE FULL HUMAN RIGHTS,  I AM ALLOWED TO PRACTICE THE PROFESSION OF MY CHOOSING,  so since I’m happy now, there is no rush. Right?”

THERE IS A RUSH. DO YOU STILL NOT GET THAT?

Oh I think they get it all right, and they’d rather mis-inform people and distract us so we aren’t able to have professional rights. And of course so they can continue immigration controls through “human trafficking” laws. Again, willfully ignorant or in on it. Just as it is with the “oh I didn’t REALIZE that Mary Daly was a transphobic hate-monger! Quelle Surpise!”

Let’s start taking note, shall we, of who believes in FREEDOM and who does not.  Let us be blind to gender and claims of “caring about women” and note who believes, or doesn’t believe, that women should be allowed to choose for themselves. Who among us believes that women are especially vulnerable to manipulation, who believes that women are so weak of mind and lacking strength of character.

This is the machine. This is what leads to the Handmaid’s Tale. They are NOT doing this FOR WOMEN. They are using women to enslave the entire world, restrict movement, enable surveillance. Envision where this may lead. Do you trust your ‘leaders’ that much?

You are a fool if you do.