Misogyny Re-Loaded Quotes

“It is ironic, in the manner of a dystopian nightmare, that an advanced capitalist empire which is founded on genocide and slavery, which still functions as the global police, which has an armed population, which routinely violates international human rights, which has the largest known military industrial complex in the world, which is the world’s largest producer of pornography, has also produced a saccharine ideology in which ‘positive thinking’ functions as a form of psychological gentrification. And it is not insignificant that the neoliberal lie that one is 110% responsible for one’s life—first powerfully encapsulated by the ‘alternative’ conservative thinker Louise Hay, and more recently echoed by Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now (1997/2005)—is directed at women. Today, gendered victim-blaming has become a form of upwardly mobile common sense ‘wisdom’. Now victimblaming is expressed by voices that sound soothing, wise, calm, above all, loving.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Every gun, warship, jet and bomb is also a theft from women as a sex class. There is more than enough money for public education, health, state funded day care systems, food and other necessities; there is more than enough money to protect single mothers and their children from deadly forms of poverty and social exclusion. There is more than enough money. Austerity is the propaganda of the new fascism which delivers violent budget cuts against its own citizens just as it ramps up global inequality and steadily arms itself with weapons of mass murder.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Rape humour signals that rape culture has escaped the law. The laughter is malicious affirmation of a culture that recognises that, although rape might officially be a crime, the majority of rapists walk free without even having to endure the discomfort of being accused by victims or publicly or privately shamed.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Rape jokes are very far from rebellious, subversive, or oppositional. They are fascist salutes to male supremacy. Laughing about the sexual (and thus the physical, emotional, and psychological) torture of females, signals one’s servile obedience to the misogynistic status quo.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Telling rape jokes or laughing at women being brutalised has become a sign of virility and a marker of masculine freedom. In this context, raping women becomes a status enhancing smashing of the feminising legal restraints imposed on male sexuality. The trending of rape jokes on the internet also gains cool currency precisely because the internet is seen as a feral outlaw social technology, anarchic carnival space where every kind of subversion is permitted and defended in the name of freedom of speech – for those men who have access to the playground, at least.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Gender is to sexism as woman is to misogyny. Sexism and gender are male friendly neo liberal words. “Won’t somebody please think of the men?” because they are, apparently, equal to women in their oppression by sexism and gender. The male elite of the new world order are actually victims of heterosexual masculinity. It would make as much sense to replace ‘white supremacy’ with the concept of ‘racially based discrimination’, or ‘ruling class oppression’ with the concept of ‘economically based prejudice’. The tactic is about obscuring forms of violence which, despite the laboriously pompous deconstructions of identity politics, are still identity based.”
― abigail bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The sexual degradation of women has long been accompanied by laughter. If misogyny has a soundtrack, it is canned laughter.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Many men, when asked a simple question about why male domination exists, reply that it is because men are stronger than women. This answer seems innocuously simple minded, but the explanatory statement that ‘men have power over women because they are physically stronger than women’ also means ‘men can rape and kill women if they want to’. There is no point replying that it is illegal to rape and kill women. The law does not come into it at all. It is as though the legal prohibitions against male sexual violence are little more that the sales pitch of a corporation eager to hide its criminal intent behind images of satisfied customers.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Living in a rape culture means adjusting to being hyper-vigilant about male violence to the point where risk management becomes second nature. It means living with the continuum of male sexual violence on a daily basis, form creepy and threatening looks and comments in the street, home and workplace, to online rape threats, attempted assault and actual assault. It means inhabiting a paradoxical space where the rape and murder of women is prohibited but everywhere eroticised and the object of laughter.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Most women are frequently labelled “insane” for expressing their misery and failing to act positive. It is form of misogynistic abuse that is also about pushing women towards the doctor’s room, the therapists couch, and the chemist.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The majority of women, like the mice trapped in the drug company experiment, are confined in a woman hating culture from which they cannot escape. They suffer continual shocks: Verbal, sexual, emotional and physical abuse in and outside the home, pervasive social contempt, a sense of powerlessness and despair, and a lack of control over their ability to work effectively or even take care of their own children. Women’s depression, as feminists have pointed out, is a logical and rational response to having one’s human rights continually abused. Depression, burnout, or learned helplessness can be compared to the ways in which the mice freeze when they hear the sound before their torture.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The fascist idea that women are biologically inferior and mentally abnormal persists. Psychiatry identifies the female brain as defective and capitalist drug companies sell the cure to women structurally entrenched misogyny is clearly the leading cause of women’s global misery. However, patriarchal capitalism does not care about the suffering of women. The intense and prolonged – and all too silenced – suffering of women is of interest to the system only insofar as it can extract profit from women’s misery. Patriarchy is not interested in depressed women; it is only interested in controlling depressed women. And psychotropic drugs achieve this by damaging women’s brains.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The brutal limitations placed on women’s emotions, the pseudo-psychiatric judgements and labelling and the herding of women into therapy and psychiatry, calls attention to the fact that women are still the second sex, a sex that is denied the full range of human emotions.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Beneath the saccharine, air brushed girls-can-do-anything image is a ruthless contempt for women and girls who have not sold themselves to the right bidder by performing the neo-liberal strip tease of self-empowerment.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Ageism is the intimate colonisation of embodied time by the vampiric forces of patriarchal capitalism that instils an ideological timebomb in the female mind that ticks with the incessant and cruel warning that the passing of time is something for which women must be punished. Women, far more than men, are judged by how old they are and how old they look. The threatening ticking of male domination reduces women’s social and economic worth to how “fresh” we appear.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Women are bullied into thinking that a man’s word is correct, to deny their own reality, to doubt their own senses, to second guess and doubt themselves continually, to erase their own knowledge, to disavow their own experiences. They are taught not to inhabit the lived reality of their own bodies; they are sexually, physically, and emotionally abused out of their minds and bodies. The culture of male supremacy subjects women to continual “gaslighting”, to a perpetual crazy making disavowal of their material and emotional realities.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The contempt and loathing women are trained to feel for each other is the single most powerful strategy misogyny has in maintaining the oppression of women. Male supremacist culture replaces the natural loving solidarity between women with hate.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The dehumanisation of women is a central political technology in male supremacist cultures. Male supremacy is founded on the idea that women are biologically inferior to men. The girls and women who have been destroyed, driven into silence by madness, murdered or taken their own lives, are the true witnesses of male supremacy.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The necropolitical core of patriarchal capitalism is snuff pornography, the abject centre that no one wants to face. It is the logical conclusion of a system that treats women as “things”, of an irrational hatred that rapes and murders countless women every minute of the day simply because they are not male. We have entered the era of shock and awe misogyny.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The logic of misogynist extermination saturates the innumerable levels of social violence, of exclusions to the point of death, the bullying, psychological, economic and emotional violence that children and women endure in a male supremacist culture the logic of misogynist extermination runs through a criminal justice system which after almost half a century of attempted reform still blames women and girls for being raped, which colludes with rapists, paedophiles, women beaters and killers to reabuse children and women when they seek justice. Children and women who have been beaten or raped by men are still considered “damaged goods”, their value as human beings diminished by male violence.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Masturbating to violence against women is an “essential, basic and natural drive” that is protected by the U.S. constitution. Sex is collapsed with sexual abuse; misogyny with free speech.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Lack of empathy towards women has not only been recoded as “weak” or “politically correct” or a sign that one is sympathetic to the “F word” – something worse has occurred. Cruelty towards women has become the leitmotif of a reloaded misogyny that I have no hesitation in naming as fascist.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“It is tempting to think of such men as a deviant sub-culture, a pathological underground, a sick minority. Yet splatter films which revel in pornographic scenes where women are tortured and killed are part of the mainstream; music videos celebrating male violence against women to the point of death and beyond are also mainstream. Misogynist hate propaganda is so normalised it has faded into the texture of the everyday – and we barely notice how pervasive it is.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“The increase in eating disorders, self-mutilation, suicide, and other expressions of unbearable suffering among young women are a sign that radical new forms of misogyny are succeeding at destroying girls.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“New communication technologies have intensified and expanded misogyny so that smart phones have become political weapons, instruments of rape culture propaganda, in the hands of a population conditioned to secure their status within the group by practising hatred against girls and women.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“It is time we recognised the casual normalisation of lethal misogyny as an act of political terrorism and not, as the mindless purveyors of the free speech doctrine would argue, as simply the democratic right to masturbate to whatever takes his fancy.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Significantly, the abolition of the family wage did not overcome the sexual division of labour, as liberal feminists had imagined it would. The double-shift, working inside and outside the home, is more like an endless hell than a golden nirvana of self-empowered financial autonomy. Now women worked inside and outside the home, often cleaning toilets, cooking and serving food, taking care of wealthier women’s children, and then turned around to go home and clean toilets, cook and serve food and take care of their own children. The new anguish was that women were being forced to sacrifice time with their children so that their children could survive. Often, the largest portion of the wages that working women earn are given to for-profit agencies which care for their children in day care, after-school care, holiday care, and so on it goes. Day care from 8 am to 6 pm, five-days-a-week for three-month-old children is not uncommon for those who can, or must, afford it. Patriarchal capitalism is a child-hating mother-hating system which values work that contributes to the destruction and exploitation of life over and above work which nurtures life.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Many in the Left have called this a class war, and while it clearly is, it is also a sex war. Women and their children, always the poorest of the poor, have come under a calculated, often invisibilised, attack by austerity fascism. In an era in which the criminal global patriarchal corporate elite is destroying millions of women’s lives, mainstreamed hip feminist pornified protests such as SlutWalk seem like diversionary spectacles. Indeed, the tragedy (if it could be dignified as such) of mainstream western feminism is the pervasive betrayal of poor women, and most brutally, single mothers.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Indeed, beneath the accusation of ‘moral panic’ that has been flung at feminism since the 1970s, lurks the accusation that feminists lack a sense of humour and are unable to appreciate the subtle inter-textual irony that is meant to pervade postmodern consumer culture and which all consumers and readers (no matter how young) are assumed to be hip to. Everyone, it seems, is in on the joke except for feminists, and the joke, as they say, is on them. Yet, the real irony is that a postmodern reading that would, predictably, claim Benny Hill rape jokes as subversive deconstructions of post-war white British lower-middle-class heterosexual masculinity, and perhaps re-signify the whole thing in a display of self-consciously elitist textual performances bloated with gate-keeping postmodern jargon, remains obedient to the old ruling bourgeois disgust with compassion.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded

“Laughing at the oppression of women is the best medicine for those who fear being laughed at.”
― Abigail Bray, Misogyny Re-Loaded