It isn't about you.

Photo copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.

After the last few days, I'm starting feel as burned and broken — as dead — as those limbs.

This happened when the Sandusky story broke, and apparently, it's something we need to work through again and again and again. And then again.

Someday maybe I'll feel more up to writing about my own experiences.

For now, I've spent the last several days haunted and taunted by the images of my own past. Not even the basic sexism and discrimination, oh, no. This is a whole other depth. Reliving — refeeling — the touches and pinches and gropes and bites and things shoved into places where they're not welcome and not wanted. Memories as tactile physical sensations. 

And the blame, always the blame. It must be your fault. You had no business being out at night. Why are you wearing that skirt? Well, you must have done something to lead him on. You're a tease. You're a bitch. You're a slut. You're a whore. You asked for it.

Day in, day out. Every day, world without end, forever and ever, amen.

So you'll understand if I'm really not interested in tolerating hijacks and derailments. For me, for any of my sisters.

Because it's not about you.

This time, for fucking ONCE, it's about US.

#YesALLWomen.

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.

Watery Trading Posts, Where the "Trade" Is in Indian Women

Photo copyright Wings, 2013. 2014;
all rights reserved.

Author's Note: This piece first appeared as the second of a two-part series at Daily Kos on September 8, 2013, as part of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION diary series there. Since this is Women's History Month, and since indigenous women remain invisible to the dominant culture except as cartoon characters and subjects for appropriation, it seemed an apt time to run them again. What follows is Part II; Part I appeared here yesterday.

In Part I, I wrote about the escalating rates of rape and other violence inflicted on Native women in and around the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — a deadly byproduct of the new colonial invasion of Indian land courtesy of the fracking companies drilling in the Bakken oil shale reserve. Last Monday, I posted a companion piece in last week's edition of "New Day: This Week In American Indian News.", noting that it would be expanded into a full-length diary today, covering the story of the colonialist trafficking in the bodies and spirits of indigenous women in the shipping lanes separating the U.S. and Canada.  

As I said last time:

This series is, among other things, about the intersectionality of race and gender in this country's culture, both historical and contemporary.

Intersectionality is simply a fact of being, of existence, for women of color. Every moment of our lives is lived at a crossroads.

Sometimes, the four roads don't lead outward, but rather, inward — toward a vortex of interrelated and competing risks, benefits, calculations, interests, slings and arrows and aggressions micro and macro and everything in between.

Today, I'm going to talk about four very specific roads:

Objectifying. Commodifying. Targeting. Trafficking.

It's spectrum and linear progression, crossroads and vortex.

It's destroying indigenous women's lives.

And today, these watery crossroads meet at a very specific vortex: a whirlpool of colonialist sexual violence in the boundary waters of the Great Lakes.

Author's Note: At the outset, readers need to be aware of the content of this piece. Much of what follows deals with stories of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence and human trafficking. If any of these issues presents a trigger for you, you may not wish to read further.

Of course, this one is also an old, old story, and even in its latest incarnation, it's been around for several years now. Unfortunately, it's been mostly women who have done the reporting of it so far, particularly Native women. Which means, of course, that it's gotten virtually no attention in the mainstream.

Much as I loathe Bill Maher's casual racism and sexism, his new multimedia project, VICE, has the capacity to change that: A white man is reporting this story now, for an "edgy" media outlet founded and run by another, much more famous white man. The CBC has also now picked up the story. So I'm grabbing this opportunity.

For what?

To bring attention to the fact that our women, our girls — our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our very selves — are being sold into the sexual slavery of human trafficking. Right here. In the U.S. and Canada. In the boundary waters separating the two countries, just as they are in the filthy, gritty oilfield towns of the Northern Plains.

Indian women are being raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, and worse — on a daily basis, and in an organized way.

And it has to stop.

Indigenous Women at the Crossroads of a "Male-Dominated Dystopia"

Photo copyright Wings, 2013. 2014;
all rights reserved.

Author's Note: This piece first appeared as the first of a two-part series at Daily Kos on September 1, 2013, as part of the RaceGender DiscrimiNATION diary series there. Since this is Women's History Month, and since indigenous women remain invisible to the dominant culture except as cartoon characters and subjects for appropriation, it seemed an apt time to run them again. What follows is Part I; Part II will appear here tomorrow.



This series is, among other things, about the intersectionality of race and gender in this country's culture, both historical and contemporary. 

Intersectionality is simply a fact of being, of existence, for women of color. Every moment of our lives is lived at a crossroads.

Sometimes, the four roads don't lead outward, but rather, inward — toward a vortex of interrelated and competing risks, benefits, calculations, interests, slings and arrows and aggressions micro and macro and everything in between.  

Today, that vortex is a place called North Dakota. It's a place that at least one writer has labeled, with frightening accuracy, a "male-dominated dystopia." For several years now, conditions have become increasingly dire for women generally. but for women of color — and particularly for indigenous women — they are downright hellish.

The further hell of it is, they've been that way for some time. And once or so a year, a few reports trickle out. They're confined mostly to blogs and Web sites of specific scope and limited circulation, and the corporate media mostly stand by and let the stories go unreported in the wider culture. Politicians and policymakers are nowhere to be found.

In other words, where the lives of indigenous women are concerned, it's business as usual.

Author's Note: At the outset, readers need to be aware of the content of this piece. much of what follows deals with stories of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence and human trafficking. If any of these issues presents a trigger for you, you may not wish to read further.