Either way, it strikes me that this is a decent microcosm of how these creepy dudes talk about women and children and other humans: as property to acquire if it has value, as a thing from which to grow that value for itself, extract value and then discard once the value is extracted, to sell off the losers, and to always always always take all the value for themselves. Women and children and other human beings and human structures have a whole point, to be defined and measured by them, while they and only they get to be the whole point of themselves.
So this also strikes me as a decent way of looking at the way they think of society, as something that exists for them to acquire and own and use, instead of as a natural occurrence that is made by all of us, that creates a generative, sustainable, inheritable value that ties us all together, to which we all owe a responsibility, not to fulfill by fitting a role defined by some master class, but simply by fully being ourselves.
Creepy, and they’re not even right!
If only there were some way to further traumatize new mothers after forcing them to give birth.
Warning - upsetting.
Good God, that was an infuriating read. Unless you want to truly get your BP up and your rage on, I would not click through on that. It’s exactly what you would expect from Texas Republican Asshats (but I repeat myself) but having laid out so plainly is painful.
I apologize for upsetting people and I have added a warning, but I felt that, rage-inducing as it is, it was necessary to inform people. I didn’t really know where else to post it.
I put it somewhere else, maybe yesterday?
Ah, yes: Gilead Watch.
That is it in a nutshell, isn’t it? A succinct way of explaining that they are not at all the same.
That’s literally a version of: men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.
Speaking of men killing women… @KathyPartdeux will likely appreciate this account on Burroughs relationship with Joan Vollmer, and how despite murdering his wife, he still went on to become a famous and beloved countercultural figure…
Trigger warning for a pretty stark description of Vollmer’s death, including an image of a mexican newspaper that had a picture of her right after the shooting…
Here is her grave down in Mexico…
And here is a picture Ginsberg took of her, undated…
Like all of us, she deserved much better than she got. Far too often, men’s successes come at the expense of the women in the lives.
I continued the tradition of arguing about this on an online group around Thanksgiving where the men didn’t want to hear of the murder other than as a glamorous fact of his life and no concern for the victim.
They were crybabies.
Edit:
His violence is as much a part of his work as being a junky was.
Pretty much. Okay, you can enjoy his work, and understand he was a dick who murdered his wife… Of course, it seems like understanding what he did would change one’s understanding of his work. The whole idea that people who make art must never be criticized is just kind of weird… they were/are people, and they’re gonna do the shit people do, which is sometimes being cruel and awful.
Strikes me that the whole narrative of the 20th century counterculture is like this, unwilling to see any faults in the men who are celebrated as outsider cultural rebels speaking truth to power, but often their own privileged positions goes unexamined.
Exactly right. The article digs into that, too.
That artist needs to look even more like a dick.
Having denied Afghan women jobs, education and free movement, ordered them to be totally covered, banned them from parks, removed their critical healthcare and silenced them with a ban on audible speech, the Taliban have plainly reached the point where the joy of torturing half the population has to be balanced, like any sensible exercise in mass persecution, with the needs and enjoyment of the male and free.
What, for example, to do about windows? Doubly enraging to the ruling obsessives, in that they offer female slaves the pleasure of daylight as well as allowing non-residents occasional evidence of their existence, these openings do, on the other hand, benefit the women’s male owners and their sons.
To immure or not to immure? Solomon-like, the Taliban’s supreme leader has now banned windows only on walls that overlook areas where women are still, by domestic necessity, allowed outside. Until such time as Afghan women can be kept – for sex, breeding and housework – perpetually underground, the latest edict stipulates that new buildings should not have windows from which “the courtyard, kitchen, neighbour’s well and other places usually used by women” are visible. …
Holiday in Afghanistan!?
Where are the Dead Kennedys when you need them?
This is soul crushing…
For those of us tracking the stories coming out of Afghanistan even before the U.S. withdrawal of troops, we saw that Things Were Going To Get Worse.
TW: extreme violence
Malala Yousafzai’s story:
Ms. Yousafzai’s answer to that violence:
Against incredible odds, Afghan women continue to work to better their lives and rights:
I lost touch with a friend who was working with an NGO supporting women-run small businesses in Afghanistan in the 2010s. These days, I am no longer up to speed on which orgs work to truly effectively support for Afghan women.
Any country that continues to undermine the health and welfare of its women the way the Taliban apparently has chosen to do is a country courting total breakdown from the inside out. Afghanis already face famine, massive droughts, drug-addiction, wartorn families, child marriage, insufficient housing, shortages on trained medical professionals and healthcare workers, and depleted uranium (a fabulously toxic metal) (the U.S. is also supplying plenty of it in munitions to Ukraine) left over from the wars–that the U.S. was involved in–on their soil. This list barely covers the scope of their problems. It’s winter in Afghanistan now, and I can’t begin to imagine the depths of the many widows suffering, along with their children. Because all women, including widows, have been forbidden to work.
Hopefully the U.N. can talk some sense into the Taliban, and get food and medicine to the neediest. I have no idea how that can happen.
ETA: typos
BBC just did a terrifying story about what is happening in S Korea
Wanna bet there are folks here taking notes?