cracking wise

"Patriarchal violence in the home is based on the belief that it is acceptable for a more powerful individual to control others through various forms of coercive force. This expanded definition of domestic violence includes male violence against women, same-sex violence, and adult violence against children. The term “patriarchal violence” is useful because unlike the more accepted phrase “domestic violence” it continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination. For too long the term domestic violence has been used as a “soft” term which suggests it emerges in an intimate context that in private and somehow less threatening, less brutal, than the violence that takes place outside the home. This is not so, since more women are beaten and murdered in the home than on the outside. Also most people tend to see domestic violence between adults as separate and distinct from violence against children when it is not. Often children suffer abuse as they attempt to protect a mother who is being attacked by a male companion or husband, or they are emotionally damaged by witnessing violence and abuse."

"Patriarchy eats its women and children and criminally cripples its men."

"Ever notice how the women in Cosmopolitan magazine so often look like they’re a hair’s breath from an orgasm? This goes for the ads as well as the editorials. Have you ever wondered: hmm, isn’t it sort of weird that a women’s magazine that is itself sold to women and is simultaneously trying to sell things to women should be filled with other women staring out of the pages making the kinds of dull-witted sexyfaces you’d expect them to be making at men whose attentions they were seeking? Why are women being instructed to look at women who are ostensibly looking at invisible men? The magazine is showing you women via the male gaze. The magazine is also training you to see yourself via the male gaze, and to put more currency in how you look to the outside observer, or how you look in a mirror, as opposed to how you look at the world, as a person seeing. The message is that women don’t see; they are only seen. You want a man? You wear these clothes, stand in this posture, make this sexyface: these are the symbols of the straight female. In a heteronormative, male-driven world, this what it means to be beautiful, or at least sexually available."

"When Feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men."

"In the wingnut world the dangers the patriarchal family faces are much more serious than global warming, even more serious than the Islamofascistterrorists, because as Dinesh D’Sousa told us, if only we kept the patriarchal family safe we wouldn’t get attacked. I did a squirrel wheel thought exercise with the dangers that supposedly threaten the patriarchal family: abortion, homosexuals wanting to get married, single mothers having children, lesbians having children without a father, mothers having jobs. Notice something very interesting? Nothing a heterosexual man might do is construed as a threat to the patriarchal family. Even extramarital sex and such is just fun and games for the men, but a real problem when women join in without the proper feelings of guilt and the needed societal shaming. It’s only the women and the gays and the lesbians which threaten the family. Taken at face value, the wingnuts are perfectly fine with divorced men not paying child maintenance or not seeing their children ever again. I am not saying that this would be what heterosexual men do as a rule or even very often. But these things do happen, especially in a patriarchal family, and the religious and conservative right seldom gets its panties into a wad about them."

"It was feminists, after all, who decided that a better standard of sexual morality wasn’t “does it fit the arbitrary rules laid down by our god that just so happen to reinforce male dominance over women”. It was feminists who decided that pleasure, consent, and real world harm were better standards. Moreover, it was feminists who pointed out that a system of male domination over women and children encouraged rape. The fact that we went from a culture that was hush-hush about child rape to one where school children are instructed to tell on any adult who touches them inappropriately is because feminists spoke out about rape. And then they saw the connection between rape of women and rape of children. And they insisted that children be taught to respect their own health and well-being over the patriarchal pecking order that child rapists like these priests exploit. Without feminism, you have prevailing attitudes like Donohue’s, where protecting male authority is so important that you squabble with rape victims over how raped they should feel."