Misogyny. I have some things to say.

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

No, this is not about Ice; circumstances remain essentially unchanged on the front. It's an image that reflects my mood right now.

For two days, I've been watching a storm blow up over the shootings in Santa Barbara — the white-hot air of honest and well-deserved rage crashing into the ice-cold and culturally stagnant front of misogyny.

I have some things to say. 

No, I'm not going to provide a bunch of footnotes, as links or otherwise. I've written about these issues for decades, and I've done plenty of recent writing here and elsewhere that covers the statistics, the demographic data, the pathologies and effects. You can find them easily enough; it's not my job to do others' work for them.

But as I said, i have some things to say.

If you think that it's appropriate to link arms in solidarity with the MRM, then you've just become a misogynist. I don't give a shit that you say it's about child custody; that bunch is about hating women, and you cannot support their agenda without being tainted by it. And, of course, we all know that when an MRA says, "It's about child custody," it's usually not; it's about not being able to control everything, including another autonomous human who happens to be a woman, and about not being able to treat her or the children in question as property.

And while we're on the subject: I don't give if a shit if they're "your children" biologically (or otherwise). THEY ARE NOT YOUR PROPERTY. Humans are not property, not commodities, not something to be owned, not even the smallest humans.

If you're actually going to hawk up the tired meme that says "there is no war on women": You're part of the war on us.

If you're going to hawk up that equally tired and vastly more dangerous old canard that you don't know a rapist (or, alternatively, that you don't know a woman who's been raped), then you're willfully blind to the point of delusion. That's me being nice, of course; more likely, the willful blindness stems not from anything excuseable, but from plain old misogyny.

If you're going to hawk up the tired and vicious old trope that it cannot be rape because [she was out at night she wore a short skirt she smiled at him she didn't scream he was her husband he was her father he was her brother he didn't have a gun he didn't leave a mark he didn't use a penis or any of the other bullshit excuses], then the kindest thing I can say is that you don't understand what the word "rape" means. More likely, you just don't give a damn.

And if you're defending those memes, like certain people do routinely (and a few of the white men and a couple of the white women in there doing so already have track records: You never met a POC to whom you would not condescend with whitesplaining, nor a woman to whom you would not mansplain, nor any bigotry that you would not defend in the service of the dominant culture): You're part of the problem. And I'll say it, flat out: You're a bigot. You're so invested in defending your privilege and the privilege of those like you that your first instinct, and the one upon which you act, is always, always to defend any statement, no matter how offensive, against the oppressed population it targets. Yes, I see you. Your motives are not the pure idealistic goals you like to flatter yourself into thinking you have.

When a dear friend of mine must must make her signature this . . . when another dear friend must write this . . . when yet another dear friend must write this . . . when a long-established bigot responds with this . . . this is a sick culture.

When my own history is this (and that is just the very top of the visible tip of a very large and very deep iceberg) . . . when merely for a being a girl a young Black girl is subjected to this . . . when our own women and girls are being abducted, assaulted, raped, tortured, trafficked, and murdered like this . . . this is a sick, violent, abusive, murderous culture.

It is a war on women. it is especially a war on women of color, but on all women. It is embedded in this culture, warp and weft, blood and bone. It is in the DNA of the twin evils upon which this country and culture were birthed, genocide and slavery. It is in the DNA of the most fundamental and inextricably intertwined twin characteristics of this country and this culture even today, colonialism and capitalism. 

It is the rape of the earth made manifest in brutalized bodies of our women.

And it has to stop.

I said last night that I have never known what it is to feel "unshaped by fear." Never.

That is true of too many of my sisters.

Go. Read this. Then read the comments. Make yourself do it. 

Can't? My heart bleeds. Because you know what? We have to LIVE IT. Every day.