On 6 December 1989, sixteen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; he went into an engineering class with a gun, ordered the men to leave, screamed I hate feminists, and then opened fire on the women. He kept shooting, always at women, as he moved through the building, killing 14 women and injuring 8 before he ended the terror by killing 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

I don’t have much to add today, except to repeat what I said last year:

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.

On what seems like an unrelated topic, I’ve been asked before, and I’m sure I’ll be asked again, what it is that makes me so sympathetic to, and inspires me in, radical feminism, and Andrea Dworkin’s version of radical feminism specifically. That’s a question that gets tossed at anyone who expresses sympathy for or interest in Dworkin’s work, but I guess it’s supposed to be especially puzzling in my case, as someone who’s (1) male and (2) pretty stridently libertarian in my politics. There are a lot of things to say in response, but the one that means the most is to say that Andrea Dworkin takes violence against women seriously. What it means for violence, and the threat of violence, to be so pervasive, systematic, intense, and socially invisible or culturally excused. The demands that places on all of us. The urgency and seriousness of the struggle that it calls for. The fact that I’m male (and that I’ve had to make the painful realization of how often what I’ve said and what I’ve done hurt women, how much it was shaped by, and participated in, the same system of male supremacy that has hurt some of my dearest friends and family so badly) harldy overrides the fact that, well, what she says is true. (I know it’s true, because it’s happened to my friends.) And the fact that my politics are centrally concerned with a radical and comprehensive commitment to human freedom makes the insights offered by Andrea Dworkin (and Catharine MacKinnon and Susan Brownmiller and Robin Morgan and…) more, not less urgently needed. As I’ve written elsewhere (with my friend Roderick Long):

Brownmiller’s and other feminists’ insights into the pervasiveness of battery, incest, and other forms of male violence against women, present both a crisis and an opportunity for libertarians. Libertarianism professes to be a comprehensive theory of human freedom; what is supposed to be distinctive about the libertarian theory of justice is that we concern ourselves with violent coercion no matter who is practicing it—even if he has a government uniform on. But what feminists have forced into the public eye in the last 30 years is that, in a society where one out of every four women faces rape or battery by an intimate partner,2 and where women are threatened or attacked by men who profess to love them, because the men who attack them believe that being a man means you have the authority to control women, male violence against women is nominally illegal but nevertheless systematic, motivated by the desire for control, culturally excused, and hideously ordinary. For libertarians, this should sound eerily familiar; confronting the full reality of male violence means nothing less than recognizing the existence of a violent political order working alongside, and independently of, the violent political order of statism. As radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon writes, “Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life” (1989, p. 161). Male supremacy has its own ideological rationalizations, its own propaganda, its own expropriation, and its own violent enforcement; although it is often in league with the male-dominated state, male violence is older, more invasive, closer to home, and harder to escape than most forms of statism. This means that libertarians who are serious about ending all forms of political violence need to fight, at least, a two-front war, against both statism and male supremacy …

Here is the speech that Andrea Dworkin gave at the University of Montreal, a year and a day after the massacre:

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.

And, as I said last year:

To be serious about creating a free and just society, we have to be serious about ending violence against women. As Andrea Dworkin puts it (speaking about sexual assault), 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. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism–stalking, battery, 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, 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 you have the money to give, make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. 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

• Toronto Star 2005-12-06: Montreal Massacre victims remembered
• Anarchocyclist 2005-12-05: revolutionary women puts many pieces together nicely.

Just a reminder: today — Friday November 25th — has been dubbed Buy Nothing Day by the Adbusters crew. I recommend that you Buy Something, for your own pleasure and as a memento of the important difference between serious, materialist Leftism, and misanthropic Romanticism posing as the genuine article. Consumers are not the problem; and you do no-one any good by harassing consumers (that is, you and I and our neighbors). Let alone making your little point by leaving huge piles of trash in the aisle for workers to clean up after.

I dealt with this at considerably more length last year, in GT 2004-11-26: Buy Something!; for this year I add only that today I bought a delicious (and completely unnecessary) orange smoothie, and several books that I didn’t need at the local used bookstore chain. And I note also Ellen Willis was right; as she put it in Women and the Myth of Consumerism (1969):

If white radicals are serious about revolution, they are going to have to discard a lot of bullshit ideology created by and for educated white middle-class males. A good example of what has to go is the popular theory of consumerism.

As expounded by many leftist thinkers, notably Marcuse, this theory maintains that consumers are psychically manipulated by the mass media to crave more and more consumer goods, and thus power an economy that depends on constantly expanding sales. The theory is said to be particularly applicable to women, for women do most of the actual buying, their consumption is often directly related to their oppression (e.g. makeup, soap flakes), and they are a special target of advertisers. According to this view, the society defines women as consumers, and the purpose of the prevailing media image of women as passive sexual objects is to sell products. It follows that the beneficiaries of this depreciation of women are not men but the corporate power structure.

First of all, there is nothing inherently wrong with consumption. Shopping and consuming are enjoyable human activities and the marketplace has been a center of social life for thousands of years.

The locus of the oppression resides in the production function: people have no control over which commodities are produced (or services performed), in what amounts, under what conditions, or how these commodities are distributed. Corporations make these decisions and base them solely on profit potential.

As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression. It is a bribe, but like all bribes it offers concrete benefits–in the average American’s case, a degree of physical comfort unparalleled in history. Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted buy actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not buying the TV?

The confusion between cause and effect is particularly apparent in the consumerist analysis of women’s oppression. Women are not manipulated by the media into being domestic servants and mindless sexual decorations, the better to sell soap and hair spray. Rather, the image reflects women as they are forced by men in a sexist society to behave. Male supremacy is the oldest and most basic form of class exploitation; it was not invented by a smart ad man. …

For women, buying and wearing clothes and beauty aids is not so much consumption as work. One of a woman’s jobs in this society is to be an attractive sexual object, and clothes and make up are tools of the trade. Similarly, buying food and household furnishings is a domestic task; it is the wife’s chore to pick out the commodities that will be consumed by the whole family. Appliances and cleaning materials are tools that faciliate her domestic function. When a woman spends a lot of money and time decorating her home or herself, or hunting down the latest in vacuum cleaners, it is not idle self-indulgence (let alone the result of psychic manipulation) but a healthy attempt to find outlets for her creative energies within her circumscribed role.

… Consumerism as applied to women is blatantly sexist. The pervasive image of the empty-headed female consumer constantly trying her husband’s patience with her extravagant purchases contributes to the myth of male superiority: we are incapable of spending money rationally: all we need to make us happy is a new hat now and then. (There is an analogous racial stereotype–the black with his Cadillac and magenta shirts.) Furthermore, the consumerism line allows Movement men to avoid recognizing that they exploit women by attributing women’s oppression solely to capitalism. It fits neatly into already existing radical theory and concerns, saving the Movement the trouble of tackling the real problems of women’s liberation. And it retards the struggle against male supremacy by dividing women. Just as in the male movement, the belief in consumerism encourages radical women to patronize and put down other women for trying to survive as best they can, and maintains individualist illusions.

If we are to build a mass movement we must recognize that no individual decision, like rejecting consumption, can liberate us. We must stop arguing about whose life style is better (and secretly believing ours is) and tend to the task of collectively fighting our own oppression and the ways in which we oppress others. When we create a political alternative to sexism, racism, and capitalism, the consumer problem, if it is a problem, will take care of itself.

— Ellen Willis (1969): Women and the Myth of Consumerism

Hope y’all had a happy Thanksgiving, and bought something worth having.

Further reading

• GT 2004-11-26: Buy Something!
• Ellen Willis (1969): Women and the Myth of Consumerism

I have some material coming down the pipe that I’ve been chewing on for a while — a little bit on philosophy, some stuff on copyrights and contracts, and some stuff on the nature of law. Plus some announcements about various things of varying interest. But my aching feet are going to keep me from getting to it today. So, in the meantime, here’s some things that I’ve had going on elsewhere:

Bloviating elsewhere

• Tonight at No Treason, I dispute Stefan’s claim that tyrants and murderers often have satisfying lives (in any sense of the word satisfying that matters), and argue (with Plato) that being a tyrant is actually the most miserable kind of life. (The point is related, somewhat, to some similar remarks I made against some utilitarian arguments over at Philosophy, et cetera.)

• Over at Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog, Kevin discusses land theft against farmers in modern history, and I follow up in comments by debating with P. M. Lawrence over land ownership, homesteading, and slavery. I defend the radical notion that the Southern plantations should have been expropriated from the slave-drivers’ illegitimate control, and distributed amongst the former slaves, after Emancipation. (It should have been distributed not as reparations for slavery — although the former slaves also deserved those — but rather because freed Blacks were the rightful owners of the land that they had lived and worked on all their lives.) Lawrence objects on several fronts; I defend.

• At Project for the New Anarchist Century, I object to Jeremy Sapienza making shit up about the civil rights movement and Rosa Parks in particular. We go on to debate the historical significance of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

• At Alas, A Blog, I object to several commentators saying, over and over again, that society causes any number of conditions that make rape and other forms of violence against women, as if society were some looming presence outside of us. In fact it just is us. And refusing to recognize this snuffs out any questions we might have about just who, among the men and women that make up society, does most of the things that constitute a rape culture. (Here’s a hint: it is not, for the most part, women.)

Howard Dully and My Lobotomy on NPR

Meanwhile, NPR recently broadcast a riveting and heartbreaking audio documentary, My Lobotomy by Howard Dully. At age 12, diagnosed with nothing worse than being a difficult child, Dully was one of the youngest victims of Walter Freeman’s ice-pick lobotomy. It turns out that the complaints were nothing but a pack of lies, but even if they weren’t, the senseless mutilation of his brain would have still have been an atrocity. In any case, Dully somehow survived with his faculties mostly intact, and is able — unlike so many of Freeman’s other victims — to search for answers about his suffering and to tell his own story. Dully also talked about his experiences some more on Thursday’s Talk of the Nation. It’s not stuff you can enjoy listening too, really, but it is stuff that you should listen to. And listening to it is not a burden; while not pleasant, the tale is compelling, chilling, and, sadly, real.

Further reading

• GT 2002-08-20: Brain Mutilation for Fun and Profit: the Story of Walter Freeman
• Psychosurgery.org: Remembering the Tragedy of Lobotomy

Sad news from the world of libertarianism feminism: Joan Kennedy Taylor died last week, at the age of 79, after a long battle with cancer and kidney disease. (Alina Stefanescu’s post reminded me that I’ve been meaning to post a note on the sad news; it also has a good round-up of tributes from fellow libertarians and links to a couple of Kennedy Taylor’s essays online.)

Besides her legitimate claim to being the leading female intellectual in the libertarian movement, tout court, over the past 20 years, Joan Kennedy Taylor ought to be remembered for her pioneering efforts for a renewed libertarian feminism, and (in general) for her astonishing ability to bridge cultural and political divides in order to relate to the best in people wherever she could find them (from her political work with the libertarian wing of the Goldwater Republicans, to her friendships with people ranging from Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg). Although she didn’t hesitate to confront issues head on, she didn’t believe that that head-on confrontation meant slash-and-burn political jockeying; and (as I’ve remarked before) this made her efforts towards a libertarian feminism genuinely transformative and not just oppositional — a conversation between libertarianism and feminism instead of just a shouting match. (Rather than haranguing statist feminists to be less statist, she offers a chance for anti-statists and feminists to understand each other better, and to appreciate what an unapologetic, full-bodied libertarianism and an unapologetic, full-bodied feminism, have to offer one another.

I know because that’s just what she did for me, personally. I remember reading Joan Kennedy Taylor’s essays for the first time during the summer of 1999, just after I’d graduated from high school. Her Ayn Rand and the Concept of Feminism: A Reclamation in Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand was one of a few essays that really convinced me that libertarian feminism and feminist libertarianism were viable projects. And also that libertarianism and feminism were more than just logically compatible; that they might have a lot to contribute to each other. In an important sense that essay was one of the essays that really allowed me to become an anarchist. And, strangely enough, it’s also one of the essays that really allowed me to become a more radical feminist; it opened my eyes to the possibility of an uncompromising feminism that wasn’t tethered to the half-hearted welfare liberal statism that I’d spent most of my high school years half-heartedly believing in. I have my differences with what Joan Kennedy Taylor has to say — sometimes rather sharp ones. But if it weren’t for her I might very well not be a libertarian at all, and I would be a worse feminist too.

May she rest in peace.

Further reading

• Joan Kennedy Taylor (2001): Liberty and Safety
• Joan Kennedy Taylor (1999): Why Aren’t More Women Part of the Libertarian Movement (see also my comments in GT 2005-07-10: Why Libertarians Need Feminism)
• The Joan Kennedy Taylor Blogspot has remembrances from her friends and a long biographical essay.
• The Advocates for Self-Government also feature a tribute to her legacy
• Roderick Long and Charles Johnson (2005): Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

New Brunswick’s alterna-weekly, [here], recently decided that they wanted to gain some Progressive street cred on the Woman Question. Thus a cover story on breast-feeding, focusing on some women’s efforts to destigmatize it, and the need for nosy busybodies and self-appointed decency police to get over their hang-ups about women breastfeeding in public:

We don’t have a lot of support for women, says Storr. She says there are a myriad of reasons why women don’t breastfeed, but the lack of support on a few fronts is the biggest reason.

Some people will say (to breastfeeding mothers), I formula fed you, and you’re fine. Beyond this, there is a public perception that breastfeeding is something that belongs behind closed doors, she says.

In Vancouver, people breastfeeding in malls and the public is common, she says. In NB, it’s not. Christina Taylor, a 31 year old mother of two who is currently nursing a five and a half month old, says she has a friend who found some trouble in an NB mall.

She was in a food court in a mall, she says.

She had a lady tell her she should feed her baby in the bathroom. She was feeding her baby in a place where everybody else was feeding. Taylor breastfed her now three year old son, but she says at times, she felt housebound.

Here, people frown on you when you nurse in public, she says.

— Brent MacDonald, [here] 2005-10-06: Breast Asssured

A point well taken. And what better way to reinforce it than for the alterna-publishers of the alterna-weekly to pull the issue off shelves and sack the editor, Miriam Christensen, for daring to put this perfectly lovely and tender photograph on the cover:

Original cover of the 6 October 2005 issue.

… because the sight of a woman breastfeeding an infant is, apparently, inappropriate for the public sphere, and we are all of us better off for their much more appropriate replacement cover, helping to demystify breastfeeding with a pastel cartoon of a mother not breastfeeding her child. Which was apparently lifted from a 1950s Kotex ad:

Compare and contrast: the 6 October 2005 cover of [here], and a Kotex ad from 1957.

… with even the word Breast dropped out of the top headline — just to make sure, I guess — in favor of First Food, a euphemism apparently summoned from of the eighth circle of Whole Foods hell.

What else is there to do other than just to point to the damn thing — from Princess Aurora to the pastel roses floating in the air behind her? Congratulations are due to the Irving newspaper group: they have officially outpaced any possibility of satire.

Further reading

• scribblingwoman 2005-10-13: When is an alternative paper anything but?
• CBC New Brunswick 2005-10-11: Irving news pulls breastfeeding cover, fires editor
• CBC New Brunswick 2005-10-12: Covergirl mother says breast is best
• GT 2005-02-25: Old Time Religion