I ran across an interesting article by Libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor (whose articles I have often admired) today giving a critical view on why so few women are involved in the Libertarian movement, citing many Libertarians’ reflexive antifeminism and the movement’s marginalization of women’s issues, as well as hostility by Libertarian men when criticized on these grounds. She advocates that Libertarians work with and try to reach out to mainstream liberal feminists. Well, I think she errs in defining radical feminists as the enemy – I think that radical feminists (especially those that are, well, anarchists/anarcha-feminists) are by and large going to be far more amenable to the argument that male-dominated government is hostile to women’s interest, than the average liberal feminist is going to be. Unfortunately, for the time being, even self-proclaimed Libertarian feminist groups (such as Wendy McElroy’s ifeminists online community) remain mostly oppositional in nature: they set themselves up as Libertarian feminists and then spend most of their time criticizing other feminists for not being Libertarian enough—rather than forging more respectful alliances between Libertarians and feminists. I hope that Joan Kennedy Taylor’s article may be the first step in the right direction towards that goal.

Sometimes things come together. Yesterday I read an excellent article on the blatant misogyny of much of the rhetoric about computers and the attitudes of men in cyberspace [Brillo], which equates computers and the Internet as feminine objects to be sexually used and controlled by men, and in which men use the technology as a high-tech way of harrassing anyone who identifies as female (particularly in chat rooms and by e-mail). And today I just read an article in the New York Times on a growing number of recent cases in which high school boys are using web sites to slag young women with sexual gossip, cruel personal details, and more. At one site set up by private school students in Manhattan, students voted on which of their classmates was the most promiscuous–and out of 150 names voted on, young women outnumbered boys 3 to 1. At another, a huge list of young women’s names, phone numbers, and comments on their looks, rumored sexual preferences, embarassing personal information, eating habits, and even their parents’ marital problems. The latter was so bad that the students were arrested on charges of aggravated harrassment. (Gruff sidebar: if the information posted on this website constitutes aggravated harassment–and I agree that it does–then why in God’s name is the Nuremberg Files counted as protected speech when it not only posts all kinds of personal information but also carries an overt threat of violence?)

I talk a lot about how great the Internet is for building new, democratic spaces, and I still believe that’s true. But, we’ve got to be aware that it also enables a lot of bullshit. I’ve talked to a lot of friends of mine who use nicks on IRC that identify as female, and they have gotten all kinds of unsolicited, harassing private messages over IRC, sexually harassing e-mails from strangers visiting to their web pages, etc., simply because they are female. As an experiment, I tried joining a large general chat channel (Dalnet #chatzone) with a female-identifying nick (AndreaGrl) and logged the private messages that I got. After 15 minutes, with no more prompting than having said hi on the public channel, I had received unsolicited messages from 38 different people, 18 of which were spammers sending porn site and sex channel ads that to everyone on the channel, but a full 20 of which were individual boys who all assumed that just because I was identifying as female, I wanted to give all kinds of personal details and help them jack off online.

One earnest young fellow decided to give the perfect summary of the Internet catcaller’s mentality:

^Mr-Sexybullet^^!who@user5533.vip-za.com: hi wanna cyber

AndreaGrl: right, i’m a female so i have nothing better to do with my time than have cybersex with every random, anonymous jackoff who msgs me.

^Mr-Sexybullet^^!who@user5533.vip-za.com: thats true

In the in a shocking development file: The Guardian Council of Iran has rejected the candidacy of all 45 women [Independent Media Center] who applied to run for the Presidency of Iran. The Iranian constitution states that all Presidential candidates must be political men, which the Guardian Council interprets to mean: No Girls Allowed. Of course, here in the US we don’t need a Guardian Council. The power structures of the Demopublican parties, and their stranglehold over electoral politics, have done a fine enough job of blocking women from running for President over the past century despite all of the progress of women’s liberation. But you can buck the system: Vote Woodhull in 2004!

Arianna Huffington continues her streak of pure awesomeness with an exposé of Washington’s use of your tax dollars on mercenary military corporations to fight the drug war in South America without inconveniences like democratic accountability or human rights protections or the informed consent of the American public. Huffington reports firefights between DynCorp agents (who are virtually all former US military troops) and FARC left-wing rebels in Colombia — while Washington maintains that Plan Colombia is not getting us involved in Colombia’s civil war. Yeah, right. We’re not, it’s just that American troops employed by an American corporation with tax money from Congress and the CIA are getting involved in Colombia’s civil war. If we keep this up, we will need to retrofit an old slogan designed for a different Latin American country: Colombia is Spanish for Vietnam.

Sometimes reality is so damn surreal that it simply defies satire. Such is the case with the Republicans’ continuing cult of personality for Ronald Reagan.

In the end though, I do hope that they build a Reagan Monument on the Washington Mall. Why? Because left-wing protestors are often down around the Mall, and we need a place we can vandalize! I mean, sure, Thomas Jefferson could be a real jerk, but if you mess up his monument most people won’t understand and will think you’re just a bunch of good-for-nothings. But defiling the Reagan Memorial would be appropriate, understandable, and relevant to the current political climate! It’d be great!