Today is the 12th day of 2007’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. It is also the anniversary of the Montreal massacre. On 6 December 1989, 18 years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He murdered them because they were women. He stormed an engineering classroom carrying a gun, then he ordered the men to leave. He opened fire on the women, screaming I hate feminists as he shot. Then he moved through the building, still shooting, always at women, killing a total of 14 women and injuring 8 before he ended the terror by shooting himself.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

GT 2004-12-06: The Montreal Massacre:

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men—and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women—because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

Today is a day to remember fourteen innocent women who died at the hands of a self-conscious gender terrorist. Like most days of remembrance, it should also be a day of action. I mean practical action.. And I mean radical action. I mean standing up and taking concrete steps toward the end to violence against women in all of its forms. Without excuses. Without exceptions. Without limits. And without apologies.

I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent.

— Andrea Dworkin (1983), I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape

The same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism: stalking, beating, confinement, forced labor, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If there is a vigil today in your community (1, 2), attend it. Speak out in memory for the women who died, and against the pervasive regime of systematic male violence against women. If you are a member of other movements (as many of my readers are members of the libertarian, anarchist, or anti-authoritarian Left movements), use today to bring a strong feminist voice to your comrades in those movements, to speak out on how any comprehensive human liberation must include the end of systematic violence against women. If you don’t know enough to speak out, make an effort today to learn more (1, 2, 3, 4). Make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. Find a local group that works to end domestic violence or rape or any other form of violence against women, and ask them what you can do as a volunteer or as a supporter to help them in their efforts. Don’t worry about what’s radical or reformist; think about what kind of concrete action can concretely undermine violence against women, starting today.

Feminists should remember that while we often don’t take ourselves very seriously, the men around us often do. I think that the way we can honor these women who were executed, for crimes that they may or may not have committed—which is to say, for political crimes—is to commit every crime for which they were executed, crimes against male supremacy, crimes against the right to rape, crimes against the male ownership of women, crimes against the male monopoly of public space and public discourse. We have to stop men from hurting women in everyday life, in ordinary life, in the home, in the bed, in the street, and in the engineering school. We have to take public power away from men whether they like it or not and no matter what they do. If we have to fight back with arms, then we have to fight back with arms. One way or another we have to disarm men. We have to be the women who stand between men and the women they want to hurt. We have to end the impunity of men, which is what they have, for hurting women in all the ways they systematically do hurt us.

—Andrea Dworkin (1990): Mass Murder in Montreal, Life and Death, 105–114.

As Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

Elsewhere:

• feministing 2007-12-06: The Montreal Massacre Remembered

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-06: Ending it. Stopping it. No more.
• GT 2005-12-06: Remember. Mourn. Act.
• GT 2004-12-06: The Montreal massacre

You may recall that I complained a few weeks ago about Rebecca Traister’s interview with Kate O’Beirne in Salon which repeated a fabricated quote from Catharine MacKinnon as not only fact but indeed old news. (The alleged quote was all heterosexual intercourse is rape; MacKinnon never said this, and has explicitly denied believing it when asked. It’s a gross misunderstanding of her views, and in the one notorious occasion on which she was quoted as saying it, the quote was actually authored by critics trying to describe MacKinnon’s views, but misattributed to MacKinnon herself by an antifeminist columnist too lazy to pick up the book again to get his citations straight. O’Beirne, too lazy or too dishonest to even pick up the book, got it from the columnist. Traister, understandably, repeated O’Beirne’s assertion; for which I don’t blame her, since it’s not her job to follow every footnote before she interviews the author of the book. I do, however, blame Salon for not fact-checking their stories after they are submitted when specific authors are quoted. Particularly when any idiot with access to Google could have discovered the problem in the time it took to type the most obvious query into the search engine.)

A few weeks later, I noted that Salon still hadn’t issued a correction even though the nonexistence of the quote had been pointed out by two different commenters within hours of when the story was first posted, and even though the New York Times Book Review had recently issued a nearly identical correction in its print and online editions.

Well, credit where credit is due: Salon should have caught the error when vetting the interview, and failing that they should have posted a correction within hours when they were made aware of the problem. But Rebecca Traister did file a correction on the interview on 26 February 2003 (and says that she would have filed it sooner, but she was out of town). Here’s the correction:

In the Jan. 17 story My Lunch With an Antifeminist Pundit, Rebecca Traister questioned Women Who Make the World Worse author Kate O’Beirne about the citation in her book of a quotation attributed to Catharine MacKinnon, calling the quotation old news. Traister failed to point out that the statement was incorrectly cited. MacKinnon never said, or wrote, that In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give consent. This line is a characterization of the views of MacKinnon and Andrew [sic] Dworkin from Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge. It was attributed to MacKinnon in a March 1999 piece by Cal Thomas, which is the source O’Beirne cites in her book. A clarifying note has been added to the story. Salon regrets the error. [Correction made 02/23/06]

And here’s the corrected copy from the interview:

R.T.: I was surprised that so much of your book was about Gloria Feldt, Ellie Smeal, Catharine MacKinnon. Only at the very end do you mention someone like Rebecca Walker.

K.O’B.: Are you asking about [why I didn’t discuss] twenty- or thirty-something feminism?

R.T.: Yes. The MacKinnon quote about how all heterosexual intercourse is rape is old news. [It is also incorrectly cited. MacKinnon never said or wrote it.] There has been a whole other wave of sex-positive feminism in part in response to ideas like that. …

Thanks to Rebecca Traister and Salon for doing the right thing.

Further reading

• GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister
• GT 2006-02-19: Misquotation in Media: Catharine MacKinnon never, ever, ever, ever said “All heterosexual intercourse is rape.” Ever. Ever.
• GT 2005-01-10: Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape

This just in…

• Catharine MacKinnon never said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.

• Andrea Dworkin never said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, either.

Quotations to that effect have been incorrectly attributed to both Dworkin or MacKinnon, who never said those words and denied that they believed it when asked. Interpretations of their extensive and nuanced work on intercourse, rape, patriarchy, consent, coercion, men, women, and sexual ethics (which you can find elaborated in detail in, among other places, Dworkin’s book Intercourse and Chapter 9 of MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State) that claim to find the view written between the lines have repeatedly been made on the basis of selective quotation, wilful misreading, and downright gossip. These facts have been repeatedly pointed out, not least by the authors themselves, but also by a lot of other people, over and over again. And yet the charade goes on.

Today, Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors (2006-02-19) took notice of the New York Times Book Review’s uncritical publication of a fabricated quotation from Catharine MacKinnon, repeated by Kate O’Beirne in her anti-feminist tract, Women Who Make the World Worse, and reported as if the quotation were fact by Ana Marie Cox in her review of O’Beirne’s book. The book review, in spite of having itself published a letter by Dworkin and MacKinnon in 1995 on the topic, and in spite of printed treatments of this in the media in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere throughout the print media over Cal Thomas’s misquotation of MacKinnon in March 1999, went ahead and published Cox’s review without so much as noting that it contained a plain error of fact that any idiot with access to Google could have discovered in the few seconds it took to type out the obvious search request. Three days later, Elizabeth Anderson (2006-01-18): Bashing Feminists pointed out the error. The Times just got around to publishing an Editor’s Note correcting the error on February 6, which went into print on February 12, nearly a month after the review was published.

Readers may remember that back in January, Salon also ran an interview with O’Beirne by Rebecca Traister back in January, where Traister casually reported the fabricated “quote” not only as fact, but in fact as old news. As it happens, two different people wrote them back within a day of when the story was published — Anonymous 2006-01-16 and Mike Connell 2006-01-17. I posted about it here at GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister a couple of weeks later. As of 6:39pm on February 19, 2006, they have not even so much as published a correction. I just sent them a third letter about the topic; we’ll see whether this produces any effect or not.

Why does this continue to happen? I’m not worried so much about Rebecca Traister or Ana Marie Cox — the lie is widespread, the challenges to it are evidently not widely known (in spite of being repeatedly made in public forums), and their primary job was to discuss O’Beirne’s book, not to fact-check every claim and citation made in it. Or even about O’Beirne herself — like most professional antifeminists, she makes her living on dishonest hatchet pieces, and while that needs to be exposed, it’s not much of a surprise. What I do want to know, though, is why professional publications that claim a reputation for accuracy and honesty so easily allow blatant, known falsehoods like these into print. Who fact-checked these articles? Who let them through without even minimal research on the quotations in it, and why has it taken a month to get even one correction?

Anderson puts it this way:

Here’s a measure of how much a group is despised: how much malicious absurdity can one ascribe to its members and still be taken as a credible source on what they say and do? With respect to feminists, the answer is quite a lot. Christina Hoff Sommers, former philosopher and professional feminist basher, has been widely and credulously cited for her critique of the American Association of University Women’s report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, although my fact-checking finds her critique riddled with errors, inconsistencies, and misleading claims. Many academic critics of feminist philosophers are just as bad, often to the point of ascribing claims to feminists that are exactly the opposite of what they say. Feminists, it seems, are not entitled to a minimally charitable or even literate reading of what they say.

Andrea Dworkin wrote something similar in the editorial notes of Letters from a War Zone, on her essay Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea (p. 110):

… One problem is that this piece, like others in this book, has no cultural presence: no one hs to know about it or take it into account to appear less than ignorant; no one will be held accountable for ignoring it. Usually critics and political adversaries have to reckon with the published work of male authors whom they wish to malign. No such rules protect girls. One pro-pornography “feminist” published an article in which she claimed I was anti-abortion, this in the face of decades of work for abortion rights and membership in many pro-choice groups. No one even checked her allegation; the periodical would not publish a retraction. One’s published work counts as nothing, and so do years of one’s political life.

Whether or not you agree with Catharine MacKinnon’s or Andrea Dworkin’s views, and whether or not you are even interested in discussing them or finding out precisely what they are, you do have a responsibility to make sure that articles published under your authority and with the imprimatur of your reputation don’t repeat exposed fabrications about them or about what they said. The pages of the Grey Lady or even of Salon shouldn’t read like the Horror File page of a Men’s Rights bully-boy. Professional journalists are paid to do a lot better than that, and it’s long past time that we hold them accountable for it.

You can write a public letter to the editor of Salon in response to Traister’s interview, or write privately, to let them know that they are printing documented falsehoods and that you expect better of them.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-02-17: Over My Shoulder #11: Andrea Dworkin, Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse
• GT 2006-01-31: Memo to Rebecca Traister
• GT 2005-10-06: Andrea Dworkin Was Right #5
• GT 2005-03-26: Fathers for Lies: Selective Quotation and Distortion of Catharine MacKinnon’s position
• GT 2005-01-10: Andrea Dworkin does not believe that all heterosexual sex is rape
• GT 2004-10-28: The rumors of feminism’s demise have been greatly exaggerated
• GT 2004-03-03: She Said, She Said: the misinterpretation of Susan Brownmiller on anatomy and rape

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. After last week’s entry I’m running the risk of seeming as if I intend to use this gimmick as an outlet for all the Andrea Dworkin quotes that I find particularly apropos at the end of the week. I already have a running feature for that, but the fact is that other than fiction and material that I’m already transcribing for the Fair Use Repository, Dworkin’s most of what I’ve been reading for the past two weeks — in part as a result of a sometimes rather combative editing process over at WikiPedia:Andrea Dworkin, and in part because the stuff is nearly impossible to put down for long once you start reading parts of it. So rather than break the rules by picking up some item just to read it at the last minute to pick out another quote in the name of avoiding repetition, here we have some bus reading from earlier this afternoon: a passage from the Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse (first edition 1987).

My colleagues, of course, had been right; but their advice offended me. I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers—overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call the street at cocktail parties. I heard it onthe street, they say, meaning a penthouse closer to heaven. It is no accident that most of the books published in the last few years about the decline and fall of Anglo-European culture because of the polluting effect of women of all races and some men of color—and there are a slew of such books—have been written by white-boy journalists. Abandoning the J-school ethic of who, what, where, when, how and the discipline of Hemingway’s lean, masculine prose, they now try to answer why. That decline and fall, they say, is because talentless, uppity women infest literature; or because militant feminists are an obstacle to the prorape, prodominance art of talented living or dead men; or because the multicultural reader—likely to be female and/or not white—values Alice Walker and Toni Morrison above Aristotle and the Marquis de Sade. Hallelujah, I say.

Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante’s Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging.

The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.

Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no.

Can a man read Intercourse? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation—such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her? Can a man read a woman’s work if it does not say what he already knows? Can a man let in a challenge not just to his dominance but to his cognition? And, specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user.

Intercourse does not narrate my experience to measure it against Norman Mailer’s or D. H. Lawrence’s. The first-person is embedded in the way the book is built. I use Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flaubert not as authorities but as examples. I use them; I cut and slie into them in order to exhibit them; but the authority behind the book—behind each and every choice—is mine. In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl; you will be looking at them. In Intercourse I created an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them. The very fact that I usurp their place—make them my characters—lessens the unexamined authority that goes not with their art but with their gender. I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves. And I do not believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits of deference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them. Submission can be refused; and I refuse it.

Of course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Many like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it—it suggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to be users. Some men respond to the radicalism of Intercourse: the ideas, the prose, the structure, the questions that both underlie and intentionally subvert meaning. But if one’s sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance—not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions—how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean—in the understanding of such a man—the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires dominance in order to register as sensation. As said as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam—and the material power he still has, especially in publishing and media—have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book.

In general women get to say yea or nay to intercourse, which is taken to be a synonym for sex, echt sex. In this reductive brave new world, women like sex or we do not. We are loyal to sex or we are not. The range of emotions and ideas expressed by Tolstoy et al. is literally forbidden to contemporary women. Remorse, sadness, despair, alienation, obsession, fear, greed, hate—all of which men, especially male artists, express—are simple no votes for women. Compliance means yes; a simplistic rah-rah means yes; affirming the implicit right of men to get laid regardless of the consequences to women is a yes. Reacting against force or exploitation means no; affirming pornography and prostitution means yes. I like it is the standard for citizenship, and I want it pretty much exhausts the First Amendment’s meaning for women. Critical thought or deep feeling puts one into the Puritan camp, that hallucinated place of exile where women with complaints are dumped, after which we can be abandoned. Why—socially speaking—feed a woman you can’t fuck? Why fuck a woman who might ask questions let alone have a complex emotional life or a political idea? I refuse to tolerate this loyalty-oath approach to women and intercourse or women and sexuality or, more to the point, women and men. …

—Andrea Dworkin (1995), Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse, pp. vii-x.

This may help to shed some light, from a few different directions, on long-standing discussions on this site and elsewhere.

Around the web in the past couple weeks. Some of the news that’s fit to link.

• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children takes on professional anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan (for background reading, see the profile in Ms.) and her latest foray into the teensploitation genre — a hand-wringing and voyeuristic article about a non-existent teenage oral sex craze amongst our Troubled Suburban Youth, and touches on feminism, amnesiac nostalgia, privileged suburban angst, and Judy Blume in the process.

  Thinking back on my own privileged adolescence, I can remember girls who performed oral sex on boys on a more or less casual basis, girls who denied rumors that they did the above, girls who did it with their boyfriends and related the experience the next morning with a mix of panic and excitement, girls who didn’t think it was a big deal, girls who thought it was a big deal, girls who talked about it loudly at lunchtime and did seductive poses with every potentially phallic food product in sight (including CapriSun straws and granola bars) but had no more than a vague idea what it actually involved, girls who thought it was the grossest thing ever, EVER, oh my God, girls who had no qualms about doing it (it in italics) but thought oral sex was unnatural, girls who tried to freak out self-consciously innocent girls like me by saying, Luke Lepinski is SO CUTE. Don’t you just want to put his DICK in your MOUTH? and then laughing like maniacs at my genuine bafflement, Christian girls who plugged their ears and shrieked if you tried to talk about any kind of genital-related program activity, even in the most abstract and theoretical language, girls who had heard you could get pregnant that way (and might have a cousin who knew someone who did,) and myself. My opinions on the matter were all based on my strong and growing aversion to boys, and were not particularly well-formed, nor did I have occasion to put them into practice. I recite this autobiographical litany as a way of illustrating the complex nature of that steady decline in morals called growing up, and to suggest that gnashing one’s teeth about the unexpected depravities of our formerly delicate rosebud-like daughters may not be the best response thereto. What is the best response? I don’t know, but Caitlin Flanagan is a bit too eager to put down Planned Parenthood for its attempts to give sane and sensible advice on the matter ….

  —Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  … and don’t miss the response to Flanagan’s closing remarks — an employment of the old Double Standard so overt and so uncritical that it leaves no avenues of criticism open other than something stodgy like rank sexism:

  Frankly, I’d rather have a daughter who gives out a few undeserved blowjobs of her own volition than a son who thinks sex is his right and privilege as a Hot-Blooded American Male. Oops, there I go slandering men with my insane expectation that they take responsibility for their own desires! Damn insidious radical feminist influence! What won’t it disfigure with its toxic fumes of seething, sulfurous hatred?

  —Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  Read the whole thing

• Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence gives a shout-out to a new program for rehabilitating men who batter women, called Resolve to Abolish Violence Everywhere. The plan? Stop focusing on anger management, and start tackling male entitlement:

  What’s exciting about this approach to combating domestic abuse is that it tackles the institutionalization of male dominance, looking at the offender’s action within a larger system of violence. Women’s eNews reports, Staffers [in Austin] say this program assumes that violence arises from a decision based on deeply-held beliefs of male dominance, not a flash of uncontrollable emotion. Whereas most anger management classes are just three or four weeks long, this program works with the offender for an entire year after his release.

  —Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence

  Of course, there’s no magic bullet for ending battery, and this program, like any others, has limitations to worry about (like the institutional limitations imposed on any program run by cops, or the fact that it only catches men once they’ve already tortured one or more women to the point that it reached the criminal justice system). But insofar as there are going to be court-mandated rehabilitation programs, this is certainly a step forward, and I wish them the best.

  Read the whole thing.

• Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts points out a story from this month’s Prospect that will make you want to tear your hair out and then run out in a blind rage and bury the entire psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex under a library of Women and Madness and the collected works of Thomas Szasz.

  But then tragedy strikes. The drug that works also makes her fat. This a horror the doctors find intolerable. Her beauty is destroyed. So they take her off that drug because in a patriarchy a hot girl cannot be fat. So Nia immediately goes nuts again because the new drug, though it does not make her fat, also doesn’t work. She is nuts again, but at least she’s still a babe. Whew. That was close.

  But she is so nuts that, after a month of hell, doctors reluctantly put her back on the fat drug. The crazy part is that Nia doesn’t give a crap about being fat. She’s happy as a clam to get rid of the voices. Yet the doctors assume that, because she isn’t crying herself to sleep every night over her lost beauty, she isn’t really getting well at all. Any 17-year-old in her right mind would be bulimic and wanna slice herself up with razors under these circumstances, right?

  —Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts

  Selections from the first five or six comments: Oh give me a fucking break, I don’t know what to do besides shout obscenities. Good fucking god, This makes me so mad I can’t see straight. That last paragraph … is insulting in about 10 THOUSAND different ways and makes me want to slap the authors and Nia’s dr’s repeatedly about the head and face, etc. That’s just about right.

  Read the whole damn thing. But only on an empty stomach. Then write a letter to the editor.

• Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege looks at the politics of housework, as one of the arenas of in which anti-feminists love to point out how women themselves are deputized as the primary enforcers of sexist standards. Shockingly, she finds that this looks more like classic male privilege than it does some kind of self-imposed drudgery that women have ended up with by being naturally the Fairer Sex.

  You see this sort of thing a lot, where women are judged by a different standard than men, but the appointed judges are technically other women, so the whole thing can be written off as women being weird instead of women trying to adapt to a patriarchal system. That way, not only can men benefit from the thing women are supposed to do to fit into a standard, they have the added bonus of acting like they are simply above such female nonsense. In the case of housework, men can benefit from having a clean home without either working or appearing so uncool as to care if the house is clean, since the work is done by invisible female hands.

  … It’s true—make-up, shoes, exercise, dieting, the whole routine is developed by and enforced by women while being sneered at all too often by the very men the entire routine is developed to benefit. The complaint is not so much that women do all these things, of course. It’s that men might accidentally be exposed to these things; in the good old days, I suppose, women worked harder at the conspiracy to shield men from having to perceive their own privilege. (For a really great example of this, read Pink Think by Lynn Peril—she excerpts an advice book to women that suggests that women should rise before their husbands to do their make-up and preserve the illusion that they never look any different.)

  … That’s the basic argument behind choice feminism, and it’s whipped out to explain away every instance of women’s second class status, from breast implants to domestic service. And that’s the argument that EricP is resorting to when explaining away the difference between expectations on men and women for level of cleanliness. It’s easy to look at how women are expected to police ourselves for adhering to a patriachal standard and say that it’s our fault. But it’s not the cops that are the ones to look at when the laws themselves are suspect.

  —Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege

  Read the whole thing. I’d also like to add a note from Andrea Dworkin that I came across the same day that I read Amanda’s post. This is from In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, in Life and Death (41–50):

  While race-hate is expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare.

  —Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death, pp. 49–50

  Maybe one way to gloss the essential goal of feminism is to create a platform from which that private empathy can erupt into public solidarity and action.

• BB at Den of the Biting Beaver (2006-02-10): Friday Fun with Sitemeter offers a guided tour to the kind of Google searches that you get when you run a radical feminist anti-pornography website.

• Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-02-03): Tarzan’s Burden mentions Hollywood popcult’s mutilation of the character of Tarzan, and points to an interesting four-part essay by F. X. Blisard on race relations in the Tarzan novels and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work in general — fairly enlightened for Burroughs’ era, it turns out, and far superior to Hollywood’s treatment. Read the whole thing.

• Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With… takes another look at Jules Verne, his literary accomplishments, his prescience, the way his politics have been excised from bowdlerized English translations until very recently, and what those politics were (in short, a mixed bag):

  Verne’s novels have contrary trends: support for national liberation movements such as the Irish and Polish, but also a strong pacifist streak; paternalism toward colonial peoples, but a hatred of slavery and imperialism (especially British); sympathy for utopian experiments, but resentment toward state power; affirmation of free enterprise, but assaults on big capitalism (especially American); a celebration of loyalty and community, but sympathy for militant individualism.

  —Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With…

  Read the whole thing.

• media girl (2006-02-10): Spying on Americans is for kids! takes a look at the NSA’s ongoing attempts at cute, furry cartoon outreach to children, which is either a very funny comment on bureaucratic rationality or else a daring new form of avant-garde surrealist theater.

• The Dominion (2006-01-16): CBC’s true colors discovers that the government-owned CBC is solicitous of the party in power in the government to the point of altering their logo to match the party color scheme. Surprised?

• Paganarchy (2006-02-04): Serious Organised Crime? Ha Ha Ha! — a squad of clowns takes to the street to protest restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly around Parliament, and a copper stops them from entering Parliament to talk with their MPs:

  Our first port of call was to visit our MPs in the House Of Commons. Just through the security gate and whoa — the duty sergeant stopped us from going in. Alas, we were deemed not dignified enough by a copper calling himself the chief arbiter of style.

  As opposed to the grave dignity of a copper who has appointed himself the chief arbiter of style for the House of Commons and taken it upon himself to make sure the dress of visitors is up to his sartorial standards.

  Read the whole thing.

• The North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists posts links to left-anarchist debate over the iterative Five Year Plan participatory economics.

• Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know? looks at mutualist anarchism, worker self-management, and the knowledge problems that afflict corporate as well as government bureaucracies. (Yeah, I know it’s from last September. But it’s good, and I just found it in the past couple weeks. Also, you may find it relevant in connection with the debate over Five Year Planning by iterated collective bargaining between the deputies of several massive federations in an appropriately participatory bureaucratic forum.)

  As Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3) of the Movement of the Libertarian Left said somewhere (I can’t find it—little help?) organizational inefficiency starts when you have one supervisor taking orders from another supervisor: that is, the point at which hierarchy replaces market contracting.

  … The central problem is that, since the costs of tracking the results of individual decisions becomes prohibitively expensive in a large organization, market incentives must be replaced by administrative ones. Milton Friedman pointed out long ago that people do a better job of spending money on themselves than on other people, and do better spending their own money than other people’s money. That’s the standard, and correct, libertarian argument for why government is so inefficient. It’s spending other people’s money on other people; and unlike a private firm not only can it not go out of business for inefficiency, it gets rewarded with more money. Well, the very same incentive problems apply to the decision-maker in a corporate hierarchy. He’s a steward of other people’s money, and the costs and benefits of any decision he makes can be determined only badly, if at all. Unlike a self-employed actor whose relations with others are mediated by the market, he is motivated by purely administrative incentives.

  —Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know?

• Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek (2006-02-09): We Don’t Make Anything Anymore takes on the factory protectionists over the state of industry in America. The worriers like to complain that we don’t make anything anymore. America is being hollowed out. Soon we’re going to be left doing one another’s laundry. Boy, will we be poor then. The problem is an old one: the heavy-industry hand-wringers are measuring the inputs, not the outputs. When you look at the stuff actually being produced, rather than the number of people employed or the size of the pile of resources invested in producing it, you’ll find that we’re making more stuff than ever. (I’d add that there are lots of reasons to worry about what happens to heavy-industry workers as they lose their jobs. And that Roberts’ summary and selective swipes at the unions are unwarranted. But the basic point is well-taken. Our aims should not be to prop up an elaborate industrial make-work program.)

• David Friedman, Ideas (2006-02-09): Unschooling: The Advantage of the Real World: One point raised in comments on my recent unschooling post was that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like, a lesson we can teach our children by making them study things they are not currently interested in studying. It is an interesting point, and I think reflects a serious error. Friedman challenges would-be educators to help students expose themselves to the natural consequences of effort and fortitude, rather than imposing make-work punishments and rewards on them in order to teach them a lesson where the incentives bear no natural relation to the task at hand. Read the whole thing.

• Tim Bray, ongoing (2006-02-10) asks, What Do GNU and Linux Mean? in a free software world where the user experience is (praise the Good) further and further removed from the technical wotsits of the kernel, where Firefox, OpenOffice, and GNU software provide an increasingly standard software environment, and where the choice between GNU/OpenSolaris and GNU/Linux is going to be a strictly technical choice with basically no impact on the end-user environment? What should you even call what’s emerging? Tim suggests some deliberate provocations: So you’ve got the combination of a Solaris or Linux kernel with a mish-mosh of GNU, Mozilla, OpenOffice and other random software, and calling it Linux or Solaris is misleading. I think Sun could legally ship something like this under the name GNU/Unix. Which would be concise, descriptive, accurate, and funny. (Because GNU stands for Gnu’s Not Unix and Solaris, after all, is.) I think maybe we should just call it GNU, and encourage ordinary users to leave the worries about what comes after the slash to people who have reasons to care about kernels.

• August Pollak (2006-02-08): As a white guy, did you just throw up right now? and Mikhaela Reed (2006-02-09): The so-called conservative Doonesbury … mention Chris Muir’s imaginary Black friend and the excellent opportunity that having one provides white cartoonists to lecture African-Americans about how they should think of themselves in early 21st century America. A Touch of Ego offers some background context on Muir and Day By Day. Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-08) calls for fixes to help Chris Muir write a funny strip. My favorite repair job is from Ampersand at Alas (2006-02-09).

• Claire Wolfe (2006-02-13): Back from the meditation workshop reviews the good, the bad, and the ugly of her two-week long meditation retreat in silence. One of the good things about the retreat was the distance it allowed from the hot air of professional blowhards that passes for News and Views these days: The omnipresent Information Flow also became irrelevant. I worried at times about what was happening to Steve Kubby and Cory Maye, but could have cared less about the monotonous, inevitable sturm und drang that passes for Vital News. Funny, too. They call it news, but the same rot was being broadcast and podcast and web-posted when I left and when I returned. Nothing new about the news. … Time to live. Time to think deeply, rather than think in quick brain bytes between rushed emails and frequent checks of LewRockwell.com, Rational Review, Google News, and TCF. Read the whole thing.

• Carnival is two weeks from today. In honor of the liturgical occasion, be sure to read up on the latest weblog Carnivals. In particular, the inaugural editions of the Radical Women of Color Carnival and the Big Fat Carnival are up at Reappropriate and Alas, A Blog respectively. Not to mention the eighth Carnival of the Feminists at Gendergeek. Enjoy!