Peg Tittle's Blog, page 34

from Greta Thunberg’s speech – wow.

from her speech at the 2019 UN climate action summit in New York (just reading this now) (yeah, I know …)

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.  We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how dare you!”

 

(complete transcript here)

 

 

Some great bits from Kate Manne’s Entitled

“Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct?  [She’s just described the common instance of women agreeing to sex so as not to be rude.]  “And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for portecting and ministering to them?”  p59

“[Hoffman and Tarzian] found that men received more pain medicatin than women … [W]omen were more likely to be given sedatives instead of pain medication. … more minor tranquilizers, antidepressants, and non-opioid analgesics than men …  [B]oys were significantly more likely to be given codeine; girls, acetaminophen …” p79  And then she quotes Hoffman and Tarzian” “Women who seek help are less likely than men to be taken seriously when they report pain and are less likely to have their pain adequately treated.”  p80  Surprise, right?  Women being taken less seriously than men?  Men being taken more seriously than women? 

“Such woeful ignorance of pregnant bodies has not deterred many of those who continue to try to regulate them.” p103  She’s referring to the guy who thought that ‘the female body had a way of shutting the whole thing down in the case of rape’.  (Wouldn’t that be nice?) And to another guy who thought the stomach was connected to the uterus.    She goes on to say “There are evidently  many  men who feel entitled to regulate pregnant bodies without having the remotest idea about, or interest in learning, how they work.”  p105  So well-put. 

“As Oberman and Ball put it: ‘The novelty of prosecuting men for abortion_despite the sound legal footing of such charges—tells us something important about the way we have, until now, framed the debate.  Boys will be boys, but women who get pregnant have behaved irresponsibly.  We are so comfortable with regulating women’s sexual behavior, but we’re shocked by the idea of doing it to the men. … women don’t have unwanted pregnancies without them.'”  [p108-9, my emphasis]

“… men often prefer unemployment to taking on jobs in nursing (for example, as a nurse’s assistant), elder care, or working as a home healthcare aide.”  p128  showing that “Even paid care work among men is strikingly unpopular.  Guess what she’s said about unpaid care work …

COVID deaths – compared to …

It’s hard to get upset about 5 million people dying per year from COVID when more than twice that, 13 million, die each year die from air and water pollution.

And over 120 million have died of global warming as of 2000 according to WHO. (Can’t find stats for since then.)

Not seeing daily coverage of either of those facts. Nor a bunch of emergency restrictions on what can be put into the air and water …

Knowledge? Truth?

So I went to get my COVID booster vaccine the other day, and I asked one of the attendants whether she knew the scienSo I went to get my COVID booster vaccine the other day, and I asked one of the attendants whether she knew the science, any statistical data, regarding my likelihood of experiencing side-effects (I’d had a rough go of it after the second dose and wondered whether I’d be in for the same with the third), and she simply replied “Oh, everyone’s different.”

Well, that certainly absolves one of the need, the responsibility, to actually learn anything about human biology, human chemistry, and psychology. We’re all unique little snowflakes, so you can’t really know anything about anyone … Hell, maybe you can’t really know anything about anything.

And then, one of the people who’d just received the vaccine said, helpfully, that he didn’t feel any side-effects.

Well, then. I guess I won’t either. Case closed. Seriously? I know, he was just trying to reassure me. But I was clearly asking for information. Apparently reassurance trumps actual knowledge. I’m reminded of the movie Don’t Look Up.

I wanted the facts. I asked for the facts. Not for what you believe or hope or want to be the case. Can no one handle the truth these days?

You fought for our freedom? Um, don’t think so.

So I clicked on one of the embedded videos on a Facebook page supporting the truckers’ protest, and this young guy rambled on and on about how he fought in Afghanistan for our freedom …  Um, don’t think so.

I was free before you went to Afghanistan.  I had freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of/from religion …   I have the freedom to vote, to get an education, to get a driver’s licence, to open a bank account,  to get a job, to own property,  to get an abortion …  And most of those freedoms were fought for, and won by, second-wave feminists.  Not you.

I don’t know why you went to Afghanistan to kill a bunch of people, but it wasn’t for me.

about the truckers’ protest

If this is what (some) Canadians do when they have to wear a mask, imagine what’s going to happen when the consequences of global warming really start to hit us, when …

they have to stand in line  not just for toilet paper, but for food – because, due to the increasing droughts, the loss of topsoil, and the lack of fresh water, too many links in the food supply chain have become brokenthey have to deal with power outages that last weeks rather than days – because the storms have become too frequent and too strong for the electricity companies to keep up withthey have suddenly become homeless – because of forest fires and the inability of the re/construction industry to keep upthey have suddenly become unemployed – because CEOs didn’t believe the sea level would rise and so didn’t relocate their businesses when they could

Speaking of which, have any of the truckers calculated how much their protest is going to increase carbon emissions?  Do any of them care?  Probably not.  They refuse to look past the tips of their own noses.  They probably don’t even see that the right to go back and forth from country to country without a mask equals the right to infect other people.    (And some of them call themselves Christian.)

Freedom’s just another word for

Freedom’s just another word for ‘I can do whatever I want.’

Mature people realize that freedoms should be limited.  (Because otherwise assault would always be okay.)

Now.  Let’s talk about reasonable and unreasonable limitations.

The Rules of Misogyny

Check it out here.

(#2 is inspired by incels and #3, #4, #6, #8, and #17 are inspired by transgenders, for those who remain oblivious of what’s going on in those fringe-to-mainstream movements; the rest are and have been forever the case…)

“Rape: leave it to men to …”

“Rape: leave it to men to turn the creation of life into a degradation.” from Jess (forthcoming), Peg Tittle

excerpts from MacKinnon’s Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws

I’ve just finished reading yet another MacKinnon book, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, and as usual, it’s absolutely brilliant. The book is well worth a complete read; I paste below some perfect gems.

(My used copy is marked DISCARD by the Porter County Library system. In itself, telling. Sigh.)

Reading this now.  It’s heavy-going, but well worth it.  MacKinnon is absolutely brilliant.  Her ideas, her articulation of those ideas, … Read all her books.  As for this one, I’ll post outstanding bits as I go along.

“If something were done about male sexual aggression and intrusion on women as the paradigm of sex, there would be no abortion problem as we know it, if only because dramatically fewer abortions would likely be needed.” p19

“…  it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women’s problem with reproduction, not reproduction itself.”  p26

“Men rise and fall. … In the lives of women, men are served, children are cared for, home is made, work is done, the sun goes down.” p32

“The allegedly forbidden quality of pornography sexualizes it by surrounding it with power and taboo and makes defending and using it appear to be an act of daring and danger … ”  p37

 “All the sexual abuses of women’s everyday lives that are not recognized by the law are there in the pornography: the humiliation, the objectification, the forced access, the torture, the use of children, the sexualized racial hatred, the misogyny.  As Andrea Dworkin has said, ‘Pornography is the law for women.'” p37

“In goin from everyday life to law, sexual harassment went from a grip to a grievance, from a shameful story about a woman to actionable testimony about a man.”  p40

“It is clear that men do not want to restrict pornography very much or they would treat it seriously, as they treat air traffic control, for instance.” p40

“Like other inequalities, but in its own way, the subjection of women is institutionalized, including in law, cumulatively and systematically shaping access to human dignity, respect, resources, physical security, credibility, membership in community, speech, and power.  Composed of all its variations, the group women has a collective social history of disempowerment, exploitation, and subordination …” p52

Read pretty much all of chapter 9, “Of Mice and Men” wherein MacKinnon compares humans’ treatment of animals with men’s treatment of women …

“Both animals and women have been socially configured as property … specifically for possession and use.  … status objects to be acquired and paraded by men … Men have also appointed themselvs women’s and animals’ representatives without asking …”(p93

“When your name is used to degrade others by attribution, it locates your relative standing as well, such as when ‘gir’l is used as an insult among boys.”  p94

“Both women and animals are seen as needing to be subdued and controlled.” p94

[There are laws against ‘crush videos’ … ] There is no such law against depicting cruelty to women …” p96

“The notion of consent …, the law’s line between intercourse and rape, is so passive that a dead body could satisfy it.” p129

“Men may identify more readily with the fetus more than with the pregnant woman if only because all have been fetuses and none will ever be a pregnant woman.” p135

“Men, as a group, are not comparably disempowered by their reproductive capacities.  Nobody forces them to impregnate women.  They are not generally required by society to spend their lives caring for children to the comparative preclusion of other life pursuits.”  p137

“… it shows how powerless women are that it takes a fetus to make a woman look powerful by comparison.” p141

“If states wanted to protect the fetus, rather than discriminate against women, they would help the woman, not make her a criminal.”  p143

“Some states quarantine arrested women prostitutes but not arrested male customers …  because the women are more likely to communicate venereal diseases than the men are.  Where the women got the venereal diseases is not discussed …” p154

“In light of the evidence, human sexual aggression is best understood as social—attitudinal and ideological, role-bound and identity-defined—not natural.  Causally speaking, nothing makes inevitable its high prevalence and incidence in everyday life, or in wars or genocides, except social rank orderings, advantage-seeking, inculcation, conformity (including to peer behavior and pressure, standards of prior generations, orders, media representations, and the like).” p240

“… consent to sex is not the same as wanting it.” p244

“You feel you have come upon a secret codebook that you were not meant to see but that has both obscured and determined your life.”  p251

“Women should study these medical articles [Jeffrey Masson’s A Dark Science] for the same reasons they should study pornography: to see what is behind how they are seen and treated and to find out what men really think of them.” p251

“In the nineteenth century, men were looking at pornography, writing theology; looking at pornography, writing literature; looking at pornography, writing laws and designing our political institutions.  Who is to say they were not also looking at pornography and writing and practicing science and medicine?” p255

“Men are very different with women than they are with men.”  p283

“Women learned, or relearned, that powerlessness means not being believed no matter how much sense you make or how much evidence you have.”  p288

“Whether Bill Clinton should resign depends on whether his ability to govern can survive being made into sex in public.  Welcome to women’s lives, Bill … Now that you are sex, do you have any authority left?” p295

“It tells us how much women are worth that something few people have much good to say about [pornography] is more important than we are.” p308

“Many spoke  of … the shattered self, and the shame, anger, anguish, outrage, and despair they felt at living in a country where their torture is enjoyed …” p314

“Through its consumption, it further institutionalizes a subhuman, victimized, second-class status for women by conditioning men’s orgasm to sexual inequality.” p316

“Most cities do not offer businesses where one can go and pay to abuse a Jew[ish man] or a Black [man] …” p317

[re protecting pornography as freedom of speech] “… women are now men’s ‘speech’ because our pain, humiliation, torture, use, and second-class status is something they want to say.” p325-6

“One [social belief about women and sexuality common on the Right] is that men have a stronger sex drive than women. That sex is a drive is assumed; that pleasure and reproduction drive men’s drivenness is treated as a natural fact.  Socially compulsive and compulsory masculinity is not considered as a competing explanation.”  p333

[In response to men being by nature predisposed to rape] “No one suggests that since men are evolutionarily more aggressive, they are hard-wired to murder, and that laws against murder should therefore be eliminated.”  p336

“Each new communication technology—the printing press, the camera, the moving picture, the tape recorder, the telephone, the television, the video recorder, the VCR, cable, and, now, the computer—has brought more pornography with it.”  p352

“Ever more women have had to live out ever more of their lives in environments pornography has made.” p352 [Consider ‘merely’ the increasing prevalence of being called a cunt.]

“As pornography saturates social life, it becomes more visible and legitmate, hence less visible as pornography.” p352

“Most pornography, if circulated in a working environment, would be actionable as sexual harassment.  The damage done would be clear if the materials were nonsexual libel or the people involved were understood to be people rather than prostitutes or sex or ‘some women’ who are ‘like that’.” p353

“… what is done to women in pornography is not a fact of nature or an act of liberation or a private peccadillo to be respectfully skirted but an ongoing social atrocity.” p356

“Public available, effectively legal, pornography has stature: it is visible, credible, and legitimated.  At the same time, its influence and damaging effects are denied as nonexistent, indeterminate, or merely academic, contrary to all the evidence.  Its victims have had no stature at all.” p359