Men Against Porn / Prostitution / Patriarchy - General Council Discussion Thread

PROPER VIBES CHECKPOINT:





ANGER

is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague.

Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.

But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.

…

Excerpted from ‘ANGER’
From CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
© 2015 David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Woman Walking
Yorkshire Dales
Photo © David Whyte
December 2015

 

Thunder
Boom, Clap, Crash
It frightens the little girl
Thunder
Boom, Clap, Crash
The little cat meows
Thunder
Boom, Clap, Crash
Outside, people run from it
Thunder
Boom, Clap, Crash
It strikes a tree
Thunder
Thunder, bellow of the night,
Tell me what the shadows might
Be for you, oh tell me, who?
Honest, breaking thunder.



Imperialistic meddlers,
men of power greed and wealth
Western Imperialism
not too long ago
was once put on the shelf
Not too long ago
this name was never heard
Its name is New Order of DiSoRdEr
But still us folk of sanity
with eyes wide open
we see their compliance
lock-step herd vanity

In White House spin gone amuck
they throw their bolts of anger
to all countries on the globe
And with more and more displeasure
we witness their destructiveness
from sea to shining sea

But now I hear, see and feel
a distant faint rumbling the rising Valorous
the rumbling stampeding of democracy
by the forceful rightful anger,
the free-spirited valiant word
a word of truth and dignity,
the echo of today,
and aaah yes
to hear the thundering of the mass
To hear the thundering of the mass...

 

"Over half of all divorces in the US cite pornography as a major contributing factor." No shit Scott...



"Lies, deception, coercion, and drugging people against their wills are all common tactics the porn industry uses to essentially film women who are not willing to be in a porn film. Much of mainstream pornography is glorified, manufactured rape designed to look consensual and enjoyable. You wouldn't be able to tell if a woman is being filmed against her wishes in many cases. Pornographers often use manipulation tactics to force a woman into a filming she did not sign up for. This is rape plain and simple."

Dear Scott Flanders and Larry Flynt,

I hope you enjoyed my messages. This song expresses with a startling clarity my deepest sentiments towards what you both stand for. I truly hope you will continue to enjoy my correspondences to both of your empires, softcore and hardcore.

Truth, Justice, & No Solace

C. Logic



"No Solace"

I’m happy to be the final nail in your coffin
I’ve dug this grave myself but you're claiming it
You can keep trying to spit that self-righteous bullshit
While you are breathing underground
A lesson lived is a lesson fucking learned
I’ll take pleasure in seeing your ‘favours’ returned
In the wake of my revenge your world will be torn apart
The least you could've done is stab me in the front you leech
Never turn your back on your friends; they will end up killing you
Too long chewing on the lies of the people I thought I knew
If you think this song is about you, well fuck you, it is - fuck you forever.
You wanted me dead, but I lived. You should’ve tried burying me deeper in the ground
Things come full circle, I’ve learnt from being destroyed
Over and over again - it runs through my head
Decided to put you in the ground to make you understand my hell
When they all hear
What I’ve got to say
Everyone will be dancing on your fucking grave

 

Hugh Hefner is a raging sex addict. I hope he recovers but I doubt he's going to in this lifetime. Holed up in that mansion sleeping with girls decades younger than him for all those years when all they cared about was what was in his pockets.


Sex and Culture
Jan 1, 1934
by J.D. UNWIN

 

One last post before I go (not forever),



“Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys. Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. Males cannot love themselves in patriarchal culture if their very self-definition relies on submission to patriarchal rules. When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.”

“Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal misbehavior, "Boys will be boys." Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict can be found.”

― Bell Hooks



PATRIARCHY QUOTES
"Patriarchy has no gender." Bell Hooks. IMG
"How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?" Dalma Heyn. IMG
"Peace in patriarchy is war against women." Maria Mies. IMG
"The woman who takes a woman lover lives dangerously in patriarchy." Cheryl Clarke. IMG
"Patriarchy is having the power to name." Kate Zambreno. IMG
"[ Hollywood] is a patriarchy, headed by men and built for men." Ava Duvernay. IMG
"When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self." Sue Monk Kidd. IMG
"If patriarchy had a specific beginning in history, it can also have an end" Maria Mies. IMG
"It's patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman." Camille Paglia. IMG
"Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life." Charlotte Bunch. IMG
"Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power" Andrea Dworkin. IMG
"The God who hates trees is the founding father of patriarchy." John Lamb Lash. IMG
"The most effective way to defeat patriarchy is to defy and disown its self-legitimating narrative." John Lamb Lash. IMG
"What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women." Camille Paglia. IMG
"Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes." Gertrude Stein. IMG
"You are not going to destroy this imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it," Bell Hooks. IMG
"Reproductive freedom is a real danger for the patriarchy, because it means that women are empowered." Jane Fonda. IMG
"Second-wave feminists didn't look for an overthrow of patriarchy. Instead, they analyzed what they were up against and fought it in all of its varied manifestations." Cynthia Kauffman. IMG
"I feel like male patriarchy generally has been about repressing female sexuality because it's "scary."" Ruth Wilson. IMG
"Patriarchy is connected to greed, a symptom of a larger force that can only be dispelled through kindness and love. It's basic Buddhism." Peter Buffett. IMG
"I will outlaw bullshit. After the passage of this law the patriarchy will inevitably start to crumble as will the concept of war itself which is largely a large load of bullshit." Roseanne Barr. IMG
"The fundamental imbalance that is behind all of the other social diseases is patriarchy." Ani Difranco. IMG
"Creation myths are not about the origins of the world at all, but about the origins of patriarchy which has claimed itself as the world" Jane Caputi. IMG
"Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky." Roxane Gay. IMG
"Smile, but not for long, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Patriarchy." Nelly Kaplan. IMG
"Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head." Roseanne Barr. IMG
"Patriarchy is impotent and qualitatively unable to solve even the most simple problems in the cosmos such as picking up their own socks or placing a carton of milk back in the refrigerator after drinking from it." Roseanne Barr. IMG
"Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance." Ani Difranco. IMG
"Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself." Camille Paglia. IMG
"A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression." Kate Millett. IMG
"The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat." Bell Hooks. IMG
"The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true." Bell Hooks. IMG
"Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis." Bell Hooks. IMG
"To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings." Bell Hooks. IMG
"The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things." Toni Morrison. IMG
"Women cannot serve two masters at once who are urgently beaming antithetical orders.... Either we believe in patriarchy the rule of men over women - or we believe in equality." Sonia Johnson. IMG
"The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal." Nawal El Saadawi. IMG
"Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman." Andrea Dworkin. IMG
"There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected." Adrienne Rich. IMG
"The enemy of feminism isn't men. It's patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality." Justine Musk. IMG
"There needs to be more women scholars, and that is not something new, we need to return to the glorified past and get more women scholars involved to overcome the Fetahs of patriarchy." Mark Durie. IMG
"I feel sometimes with boys that the tyranny of patriarchy has had a much more devastating blow on boys than it has on anyone. Because they have literally been forced to disassociate from their hearts." Eve Ensler. IMG
"I think what's happening in the world - there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded beast, and the patriarchy is wounded." Jane Fonda. IMG
"Women are rising. And I think that's all the violence and war - it could be the last gasp of the patriarchy, actually." Jane Fonda. IMG
"If you look at capitalism and patriarchy, they're both such hierarchical, competitive, oneupmanship systems. They've trained us all [to think] that power means having all the goods or having the most money or having the most attention or having the most fame. That's not the power that interests me. Actually, the deconstruction of that power is what interests me." Eve Ensler. IMG
"In 2014, when Hillary Clinton was not yet running for president, I stated that I was not in agreement with her politics. More recently, when asked my thoughts about Hillary Clinton during a public conversation with Gloria Steinem, I stated, "she embodies the very best of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't vote for her." Bell Hooks. IMG

 

cont'd:

"Young women at our elite colleges are among the safest, most privileged and most empowered of any group on the planet. Yet, from the moment they get to campus - and now, even earlier - an endless stream of propaganda tells them otherwise. They are offered safe spaces and healing circles to help them cope with the ravages of a phantom patriarchy." Christina Hoff Sommers. IMG
"The word "sin" is derived from the Indo-European root "es-," meaning "to be." When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, "to be" in the fullest sense is "to sin'." Mary Daly. IMG
"The enemy of feminism is' men. It's patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality." Justine Musk. IMG
"Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying." Gloria Steinem. IMG
"Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole." Kate Middleton. IMG
"There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and this pressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied, that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality." Marilyn Frye. IMG
"... patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all-even as we forge different individual choices within them-just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism." Gloria Steinem. IMG
"If you need ownership and responsibility from core workers, patriarchy can't get you there." Peter Block. IMG
"One of the key things about the entitlement and power of patriarchy, but also within feminism, is not that it's wilful nastiness. But you can't ask for permission. You can negotiate and you can bring people on board and you can build a base but you can't expect for it to be given." Rachel Holmes. IMG
"What is clear is that Malcolm X incorporated within the framework of black nationalism a pan-Africanist and internationalist perspective. In doing so, he began to reassess radically earlier positions sexism and patriarchy. He began to break with notions of sexism that he had long held as a member of the Nation of Islam, and began to advance and push forward women leadership in the OAAU." Manning Marable. IMG
"Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society." Ani Difranco. IMG
"Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off." Eve Ensler. IMG
"It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge." Gloria Steinem. IMG
"We're witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It's already happening. And I think that the good news is that it's coming just in time." Leonard Shlain. IMG
"Judaism is one of the last of the world's matrilineal philosophies. Matriarchies are always the cultures that patriarchy attacks and decimates, because they don't spend all their money on the military like patriarchy does. They are easy prey." Roseanne Barr. IMG
"Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration." Timothy Morton. IMG
"Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love." Bell Hooks. IMG
"Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself." Sue Monk Kidd. IMG
"Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?" Bell Hooks. IMG
"I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy." Carol Gilligan. IMG
"I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!" Mary Daly. IMG
"I wish she'd said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can't hide from it, not even here." Raquel Cepeda. IMG
"Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it." Cornel West. IMG
"Patriarchy is bestowed on men at birth. Whether you want it or not, you have a privilege as a man, and you either fight against it and reject it by becoming a feminist man, or you enjoy the privileges that come with it." Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. IMG
"Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature." Kate Millett. IMG
"Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive" Bell Hooks. IMG
"In using terms like patriarchy, hermeneutics, and sexual/textual, I do not wish to misrepresent the Qurn as a feminist text; rather, the use of such terminology shows my own intellectual disposition and biases." Asma Barlas. IMG
"The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness." Phyllis Schlafly. IMG
"Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism." Bell Hooks. IMG
"The prince exults whomever he selects as his consort, but the queen, rather than elevating the subject of her choice, humiliates him as a man. By all that is right, a man is not intended to be the husband of his wife, but a woman is to be her husband's wife." Franz Grillparzer. IMG
"The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root 'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin'." Mary Daly. IMG
"I do' understand all the nuances of the women's movement. But I do understand that there are feminists who want to challenge the dominant paradigm, not only of patriarchy, but of where the original wealth came from and the relationship of that wealth to other peoples and the earth. That is the only way that that I think you can really get to the depth of the problem." Winona Laduke. IMG
"Only the violent acts of men "count" toward something besides evil in a patriarchy. It is the male story of violence that is sanctioned both socially and aesthetically. The male hero and acts of heroism require violence. Everyone is okey dokey with that. We are only beginning to see that constricting set of truths open up a little." Lidia Yuknavitch. IMG
"Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating." Andrea Dworkin. IMG
"I knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable." Michael Eric Dyson. IMG
"Some people are surprised that the Republicans are waging a war on women, or that they voted against equal pay for women. I'm not surprised at all. In some ways, it may be a good thing. They're defending the patriarchy, which is a wounded beast! And wounded beasts are always dangerous." Jane Fonda. IMG
"Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism." Bell Hooks. IMG
"I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is-I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age." Elizabeth Gilbert. IMG
"Madonna Kolbenschlag suggest that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, if she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance. I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence. This stance can be assumed from the inside or the outside. Whichever place we choose, the important thing is having the sustained will to be, act, and speak from the ground of our feminine souls." Sue Monk Kidd. IMG
"There is no patriarchy or matriarchy in the garden; the two supervise each other. Adam is given no arbitrary power; Eve is to heed him only insofar as he obeys their Father-and who decides that? She must keep check on him as much as he does on her. It is, if you will, a system of checks and balances in which each party is as distinct and independent in its sphere as are the departments of government under the Constitution-and just as dependent on each other." Hugh Nibley. IMG
"Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it." Ashley Judd. IMG
"Where those two energies [male and female energies] intersect, all creativity is possible. We already have divine creative energy within us. And what is the most powerful of these energies? The energy that patriarchy and misogyny constantly try to repress. The divine female sexual energy. The creative energy of the female. That is why I worship divine sexual female energy." Russell Brand. IMG
"This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word "patriarchy." Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?" Bell Hooks. IMG
"What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy." Bell Hooks. IMG