All posts in category Activism

Solstice reflections: Women as Victims of Violence and as Peace Agents

Winter solstice eve, 2011.

The darkest day of the year, and yet presaging the return to light.  The stars and planets continue to wheel overhead, taking little notice of all the sturm und drang here on Earth.

Tonight there is one image that keeps calling out to me for comment.  It goes by the Web shorthand “woman with the blue bra, Cairo.”

Did you see that one?

Someone captured on camera a brief two minutes of violence in Cairo, Egypt, when an unnamed protester was dragged by military forces in the street, then stripped of her abaya, under which she wore only a blue bra–and then beaten up some more.

WordPress has taken away my ability to post video, so you can watch it here.

It goes right up there with the video from New York City, towards the beginning of the OWS protests, of a police officer spraying peaceful, captive girls in the face with pepper spray.  This video has apparently been watched on You-Tube more than 1.5 million times.

There is something about seeing women being beaten up by masked, uniformed security forces that sets off particular triggers in most of us.  It’s certainly no accident that the Occupy protests swelled dramatically in numbers after that pepper-spray incident, or that more than 10,000 protesters, mostly women, turned out in Cairo following the posting of this image on the Web.

Part of me wants to question why it is that we get so upset when women protesters are attacked.  After all, they knew the risks they were running when they went out into the street.  And what’s the big difference between a man and a woman being beat up by goons, anyway?

But there is a difference.

The difference is that it’s always men doing the beating.

Yes, we have some women in police and military uniforms.  And yes, women can be violent.  But you will have to look long and hard to find cases where women bore the responsibility for killing or attacking civilians, in any circumstances.  It may happen, but it’s pretty rare.

So when we see a mob of men stripping and beating a woman–in a society where nudity is absolutely taboo, to boot–it’s impossible to ignore the full impact of the insult intended.  And in a society where women are forcibly kept out of leadership roles, the message is all the clearer.

Stay at home where you belong, or we’ll do this to you, too.

I’m so glad that the women of Cairo did not take this attempt at intimidation lying down. Just like the women in New York, who took the unwarranted police brutality as a gauntlet thrown down to test their protest mettle.

The question of whether men are in fact more aggressive than women is still a matter for debate in academic circles, but taking a look around the world, it’s pretty clear that men commit almost all the violence in every context.  When women murder or assault, it’s almost always in self-defense.

And yet women are still held back from leadership roles in most societies, and even held back from the peace-making negotiating tables in post-conflict regions.  A big exception is Rwanda, where women have taken a leadership role in rebuilding that shattered society–mostly because the men had succeeded so well in killing each other off.

We have moved past the point in the intellectual history of gender studies where feminists were striving to be “the same as” men.  Women don’t want to be the same as men if it means repeating the same old history of violence and abusiveness.

What we need is to move, as men and women, beyond the violence that has continually plagued human society.

Violence towards each other; violence towards other species and the rest of the world.

The only way to move forward as a species is to disable that aggressive switch, and become the consensus-seeking conciliators we have always been in our finest moments as human beings.

As we return to light this solstice night, this is my fervent prayer: that the aggressive, masculine energy that has dominated this planet for the past 5,000-plus years will begin to shift to a more peaceful, creative, feminine energy, from which both men and women–and the planet as a whole–will benefit.

Let it be so.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Human Rights, Politics of Gender
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 21, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/21/solstice-reflections-women-as-victims-of-violence-and-as-peace-agents/

The Silence of the Bees

Usually during the holidays I catch the frenzied good cheer from everyone else and wind myself up to make merry.  This year, I just can’t seem to find the spark.

Maybe it’s a case of SAD (seasonable affective disorder).  Maybe it’s the fact that it’s the first holiday after my divorce was finalized, and that new reality is sinking in.  Maybe it’s the gloomy state of the economy, which is certainly negatively affecting my financial outlook.

But I think it goes deeper and broader than these personal issues.

I feel like I’m grieving, but not for any one person.  I’m grieving for the loss of my future, and all of our futures.  Even as I stoutly maintain that we can’t give up hope, and we need to keep fighting, there is something in me that keens, heartbroken, for the huge loss that we all face.

It’s already started, the great dying-off.

I keep remembering a certain perfect May morning in my childhood, when I waded out into the deep, fragrant grass under the old, half-wild apple trees, which were glorious in full pink-and-white bloom.  I lay in a grassy nest under one of the trees–no worries about ticks and Lyme disease in those days–looking up at the blossoms outlined against the startling blue of the sky.  The petals rustled gently in the breeze, and the sound of thousands of busy buzzing honey bees filled the air.  Watching carefully, I could see the bees moving from blossom to blossom, carrying their saddlebags full of bright golden pollen.  My heart swelled with the sheer joy of being alive in that moment, a part of the humming life of that orchard on that beautiful spring day.

Flash forward to last spring, when I went out into the same old orchard on another lovely May morning, and was aghast to realize that not a single bee was working the blossoms of the tree.  The silence was frightening, like the desolate silence of a wasteland, though visually it all looked very much the same.

This is just one small example of so many countless instances of the glorious richness of life on our planet, profoundly and irrevocably being silenced.

So yes, I am grieving.  And I am angry.  And I do not know the best way to try to head off the end that seems so inevitable now.

Sometimes it feels like I’m living in a sci-fi movie, where everything seems so hopeless, the bad guys are winning…and then at the last moment, the heroes sweep in and save the day.  I want to believe that we can be those heroes.  Perhaps it will be like the TV series “Heroes,” where many of us who are preparing ourselves now for the fight will come together and really be able to make a difference.

But I don’t count on it.  Because, in large part, the “bad guys” are us.  We’re doing this to the planet.  The laptop I type on is part of the problem, the electric lights I just strung up on my porch are part of the problem, the car I drive is part of the problem.

What would it mean, really, to stop being one of the bad guys?  To become one of the vast army of everyday heroes needed to save this planet?

I keep asking this question, and I will keep asking it until the answer becomes clear.  I feel I am taking some sort of step in the right direction just by asking the question in this public forum, seeking out like-minded people who may have answers I could not come to on my own.

I know we need each other now, more than ever.  The old individualist way of doing things is part of the problem.  Interconnection should be the buzzword of the second decade of this century.  As the planet heats up, our survival will depend on our being able to cooperate and collaborate on adapting to the new, much harsher environment.


 Sometimes I have moments of hysteria, when I feel like I’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and need to decide how I want to spend my last days.  Maybe this isn’t so hysterical after all…this may be a rather sober assessment of the way things stand.

Of course, we are all living under a life sentence, all the time!  But I no longer feel I can count on living into old age, dying a natural death.  Saving for retirement seems like a pipe dream, left over from a 20th century mindset that no longer makes sense.

The only  antidote I know for the grief and depression born of full apprehension of the reality of our very bleak and uncertain future is simply this: carpe diem, seize the day.

Unless we ordinary heroes come together to create a mighty and unstoppable wave of change very soon, the planet will heat up beyond our comfort zone, causing severe weather that will send us floods, famine, conflict and extinctions on a biblical scale.

Yes, ultimately the planet will regenerate, and new forms of life will emerge.  But we will not be here to play our part–to love, appreciate, tend and respect the other living beings on Earth.

It is too soon to give in to grief.  I will shake it off, rouse myself, continue as long as I can to stand up and be counted among the opposition to the terrible destruction that our way of life has visited on so many others on this planet.

Meet me out in the apple orchard, listening for the bees….

15 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 18, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Resilience, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 18, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/18/the-silence-of-the-bees/

Call to Action in Dark Times

This time of year in New England is cold and dark: short days and long, starry nights.  As the planet wheels towards the winter solstice, human beings, for thousands of years, have huddled around fires and turned to storytelling as a bridge back to warmth and the coming of springtime.

It’s no different now, except that now most of us burn oil for our heat, and hang up strings of electric lights to symbolize the return to light.  We watch movies, read books or play video games instead of listening to clan storytellers.

In America, as in much of the world, the dominant religious stories of this time of year have to do with keeping hope and faith alive in dark times.  Jews remember, with the lighting of the Menorah candles, the preservation of their faith in the 2nd century BCE, after the destruction of the Second Temple; Christians celebrate miraculous birth of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer who would bring the word of God to the people.

All of the traditional religious stories document a continuing human saga of light against dark, with light representing life and good energy, while dark represents death and possible danger.

More contemporary mystics also point to human life as a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

Rudolf Steiner, for example, the influential psychic who reported many out-of-body experiences where he made direct contact with metaphysical beings, routinely talks about angels and demons in his copious writings, with angels representing the good forces of light and life, and demons being the dark forces of destruction.  Freud too, in a more secular register, described Eros and Thanatos as primal human drives that align along the same lines: light/life/love, dark/death/hatred.

Is there something to all this?

In a scientific age, it’s hard to write with a straight face about angels and demons.  We are trained to see them as figures of speech, metaphors for empirically definable natural phenomena.  To whit: Human beings tell stories about angels and miraculous births at the darkest time of year as a metaphorical way of talking about the winter solstice and the return to light.

Yes.  But there have always been persistent voices telling us that this is not just metaphorical.  That there really are forces of dark that are destructive and forces of light that represent goodness, and that human beings, as the most self-aware sentient beings on the planet, are able to recognize the grand struggle between Good and Evil playing out in our psyches, and on our battlefields.

For instance, take Derrick Jensen‘s latest book, Dreams, in which he talks about his growing belief that there are metaphysical realms that human beings access in dreams, and that in the dream world there are “sides”: the side of life and the side of death and destruction.  As humans, we have a choice, Jensen says; we can choose which gods to worship, those who represent the life-giving energies of the planet, or those who represent the blood-sucking zombies that are leading us down the capitalist/imperialist road to doom.

Even further out along the spectrum of contemporary metaphysical thinkers is Alex Kochkin, who has been sending out dispatches through email and Web for some time now, warning that the end times are coming.  One could mistake Kochkin for an Armageddon-spouting Christian fundamentalist, except that, like Jensen and Steiner, he has no religious scaffolding framing his ideas.

All of these thinkers agree with indigenous shamans the world over that there is much more to human beings than our physical bodies, and that we can interact with higher powers through individual psychic work–paying attention to our dreams, meditating, being open to the realms of human consciousness where, they say, we can connect with what Steiner called “higher worlds.”

Alex Kochkin: “”You” are the result of a portion of your larger being extending something of itself into this level of density. In this case, it is a human bio-vehicle that comes equipped with basic firmware and an operating system. Flawed as the whole package may be, it is still a viable and valuable way for individuations of The All of Creation to reach into its own deepest recesses, even those that have become overwhelmed by the disease of the Dark.”

Derrick Jensen gives the “disease of the Dark” more concrete names: capitalism, imperialism, and the science that justifies and extends the reach of these destructive ideologies that have, since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, been rapidly reducing bio-diversity and inexorably altering our eco-system.

Jensen recalls the Aztec sacrifices to their gods, and speculates that we too are unthinkingly making sacrifices to our contemporary gods of Science and Capitalism.

This is an idea that one of my mentors, Rigoberta Menchu, suggested years ago, talking about how destructive the Euramerican ideologies and technologies have been to the natural world and indigenous peoples: “I often wonder why people criticize the Aztecs for offering human sacrifices to their gods when they never mention how many sons of this America, Abia Yala, have been sacrificed over five hundred years to the god Capital,” Menchu said in her second testimonial, Crossing Borders.

Whether or not there are “higher powers” involved in the life-and-death battles we are seeing played out at ever-accelerating speed in these dark times, it is true that we human beings are the ones with the power to change the course of events we have set in motion.  The fish and the birds and the great bears cannot change what is happening to their environments because of human short-sightedness and greed.  The ancient forests that have stood for thousands of years cannot withstand the bulldozer and the chain saw.  The river that has flowed for eons cannot resist the concrete dam.

Only we have the power of reversing the “disease of the Dark.”  If there are higher powers involved, they are not going to do it for us–they will only work through us.

Which stories are we listening to now as we huddle around our mechanical fires?  The old stories of dominion and destruction, “manifest destiny” and technological prowess leading to “progress” have held sway long enough.  It’s time to listen to stories that are older and wiser than the Judeo-Christian myths, stories that remind us of our deep connection to the natural world that sustains us.

Let every candle lit this solstice season be a call to action on behalf of the life energies of this planet.  And then, let us act, before it’s too late.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 17, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, New stories, Politics, Social change, Spiritual growth
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 17, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/17/call-to-action-in-dark-times/

An Eco-Humynist Manifesto for the 21st Century

Having watched with dismay as the Durban climate talks sputtered to a disappointing conclusion, with all parties knowing that every day that goes by without concerted international effort to address climate change means the inexorable shifting of life as we know it on Earth, I was moved yesterday to put fingers to keyboard and come up with a Manifesto for change.

Even as I was writing it, I was thinking that such radical changes would not be possible to put into place without resistance from the status quo powers that be; therefore bloodshed, which is specifically antithetical to the principles I lay out, would be inevitable.

But if a World War III must commence, I would rather it be for a good cause like this one, than for the petty greed, bigotry and hatred that have propelled humanity into previous wars.

If we want not only ourselves, but our entire eco-system to survive, do we have any other choice but to take decisive action now?

An Eco-Humynist Manifesto for the 21st Century

Whereas human beings have acted in a dominating fashion towards each other and towards other living species on this planet, using the excuse of difference to justify aggressive and destructive behavior;

Whereas competition has been used as a rationale for economic systems based on hierarchical systems of power;

Whereas social exclusion and systematic discrimination has been seen as the normative right of dominant groups;

Whereas privileged groups have felt entitled to take more than their fair share from the environmental commons, and to deprive less powerful groups, whether human or of other species, of the resources necessary for well-being;

Whereas it is quickly becoming apparent, in the age of climate change, that the dominant paradigm of capitalist patriarchal social relations is resulting in the dangerous destabilization of the entire natural ecosystem;

The time has come to take action to change this paradigm in the following ways:

1. Move from a top-down hierarchical system to a horizontal, egalitarian model of social relations based on inclusivity across all of the traditional boundaries used to keep different groups apart, including race, class, gender, sex, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and also opening up the possibility for cross-species collaboration based on respect and stewardship;

2. Shift the worldwide economic system to a model of global cooperation and collaboration, with the focus of human industry and government on providing a baseline of well-being for all life forms on this planet, regardless of geographic origin or antiquated ideas of relative importance (ie, who is to say that a human being is more important than a songbird, or a sardine?);

3. Tailor the education system to teaching the history of the destructive cultural practices of homo sapiens up to the 21st century, and opening up constructive conversations across disciplines, where alternatives to these traditions can be envisioned and developed;

4. Model egalitarian, collaborative, respectful social relations in the private sphere of the family as well as the public spheres of education, the profession, government and law;

5. Shift from a violent conflict and punishment model of resolving disagreements to a peaceful persuasive model, with the goal always being the well-being of the community as a whole first, and secondly each member of it.

6. Destroy all weapons of mass destruction, as well as all bio and chemical weapons, and their blueprints.

7. Disallow any one person’s or minority group’s interests (with rich people and businesses or industries rightly being considered minorities)  to take precedence over the interests of the majority, including the non-human majority on this planet.

8. Develop an appropriate representative global governing council to administer these principles.

In the name of Mother Earth and ALL of her children, I call on the peoples of the world to act without delay to become the stewards of the planet and the collaborative, respectful individuals we were always meant to be.

Thanks to the students of Gender, Culture & Society, Fall 2011, for the inspiration to write this Manifesto.

37 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 13, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Education, Environment, Human Rights, Politics, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 13, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/13/an-eco-humynist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century/

On Human Rights Day, Calling the Next ‘Greatest Generation’

Today, Human Rights Day, I call upon the peoples of the world to understand that if we don’t focus on reducing human impact on the global environment in this new century, all the other more isolated issues will be moot.

Issues from the militarization of the police, to the use of rape as a weapon of war, to the stifling of free speech and democracy, are important—but they’re just minor skirmishes.

The real battle for human rights is taking place in the realm of energy politics.

It’s taking place on the thousands of oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s taking place in the hundreds of new hydro-fracking wells being dug in upstate New York and Pennsylvania.

It’s taking place in the coal mines of China and the tar sands of Canada.

All of us are players in this deadly game.  Every time we turn the key in the ignition of our car, or buy food produced by a factory farm, or pay our electric bill.  We participate as consumers, and as consumers, we have more power than we realize.

On Human Rights Day, we need to remember three things:

•   The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the human right to health

•   A healthy environment, including healthy food, water and air, is essential to human health

•   Corporations, not being people, must not be allowed to trample on human rights.

Indeed, corporations, being human creations, should be serving human rights.

If a healthy environment is essential to human rights, then corporations should be working on making our environment as healthy as possible.  Corporations work for us.  They need to meet our needs, and uphold our rights.

There is a new movement afoot to define and uphold the Rights of Nature, which is a totally laudable goal. But in my view, the rights of the natural world and the rights of human beings are inextricably intertwined.

To truly uphold human rights would be to truly uphold the rights of Nature.

We are animals.  We are part of the natural environment of this planet.  If we foul and destroy our environment, we will die, along with countless other living beings: animals, insects, marine life, birds and plants.

This is a big battle; these are momentous times. We need to step up and be the new “greatest generation.”  We need to hold corporations accountable for their destructive, life-threatening actions.  We need to insist on change.

If we don’t, will anyone be left to lament our failure?

1 Comment
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 10, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Human Rights, Politics, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 10, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/10/on-human-rights-day-calling-the-next-greatest-generation/

Swept away for the holidays? C’mon, Occupy, Let’s Go!

Looking back over the week, it seems like we’ve settled into some kind of holding pattern. The Occupy protests keep spinning, including a jubilant rally in Boston last night, but there is a feeling that we’re all waiting for the next shoe to drop…the next big push, the next new thing.

This week saw Occupy Foreclosures; next Monday there is a plan afoot to shut down the West Coast ports. The student protests are still sputtering; there is a group of hunger strikers in New York demanding a home for OWS;  and a stalwart group of climate activists has been braving relentless hostility to protest in at the COP 17 talks in Durban.

I’m glad to see all this stirring of outrage and energy.  I’m just starting to get confused by all the different tangents the movement is taking, and wishing for more focus and concentrated action.

I want the 99% to be like a biblical flood that will wash all the corruption and evil away, leaving a sparkling new world ready for re-occupation.

I know full well that’s unrealistic.  It’s not meant to be taken literally.  It’s just the kind of mood I’m in: impatient, restless, tired of the same old same old.

I have that same feeling about the holidays this year.

Are we really going to go through those motions again?  Are we going to fool our little children into believing in Santa Claus?  Are we going to laugh and clink glasses at innumerable holiday parties?  Are we going to go on shopping sprees for presents at the malls?

Again I’m reminded of the band that was ordered to keep playing as the Titanic sank.  There’s a new 3-D version of the Leo DiCaprio/Kate Winslett Titanic coming out soon–as if what we really needed was to watch that horrible tragedy again, in 3-D.

Folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we need to stop fooling ourselves, we need to get real. If we don’t profoundly change our ways NOW, Mother Earth will do it for us, and she won’t be pussy-footing around.

I was listening to a news report today about how many billions of dollars in damage Hurricane Irene caused back in late August. Then there was the October snowstorm, knocking down trees and powerlines for millions of people in the Northeast.

What’s next?  How bad does it have to get before we stop pouring good money after bad, cleaning up after natural disasters that could perfectly well have been avoided if we focused on prevention rather than on damage control?

We do the same thing with health issues.  We spend billions looking for the “cure” for cancer, when the real issue is lurking upstream, in all the toxic chemicals we’re dumping into the environment and our own bodies.

We know what makes us sick. We know what is making our climate “sick” and out of balance.  We know how to fix it too–we need to start converting to renewable energy as fast as we can, immediately!  All systems go!

And it’s the same with the sociopolitical system.  We know where it’s broken.  Campaign finance reform is not a new idea.  Bank and finance regulation is nothing new.  Social policies that bolster the middle class are obvious.

WHY AREN’T WE DOING THESE THINGS?

The Occupy movement has the potential to fire up enough people to get out there and demand change.  The movement just needs to articulate a few clear, incontestably worthy goals, and pour all the creativity of the 99% into finding ways to pressure the ruling class to get the job done–or be swept away.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t much feel like celebrating this holiday season.  I feel like rolling up my sleeves, joining forces with my neighbors, and getting to work.  There is so much to be done, and so little time.

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 9, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, Politics, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 9, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/09/swept-away-for-the-holidays-cmon-occupy-lets-go/

College climate activists lead the way at COP 17 in Durban

You have to hand it to the college students attending the U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Durban.  They know how to cut through the nonsense and tell it like it is.

Watch 21-year-old Middlebury College junior Abigail Borah telling the august assembly that they can no longer afford to drag their feet on curbing carbon emissions.

“I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot,” said Ms. Borah, a representative of the International Youth Climate Movement. “The obstructionist Congress has shackled justice and delayed ambition for far too long. I am scared for my future. 2020 is too late to wait. We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty.”

The response to her entreaty?  A swift escort off the premises.

Another group of students dressed as “corporate clowns” to bring some levity to the grim discussions.  As documented by the Climate Connections blog, they too were met with hostility by the powers that be.

While talking with the press, student clown Kevin Buckland “was grabbed and hauled away. His badge was taken, and he was barred from the International Conference Center.”

Then there was the group of Canadian students who were removed from the assembly hall just for displaying tee-shirts with the words “Turn Your Back on Canada,” a criticism of the Canadian government’s support for the oil extraction of the Alberta boreal forests (aka “tar sands”).

What kind of message are these young people going to take away from these incidents about the efficacy of trying to participate peacefully in global assemblies?  No wonder they’re turned off and turning to their own “people’s assemblies.”

As Laura Carlsen points out in an article posted on Common Dreams today, climate change activists need to “broaden the focus from once-a-year meetings in high-carbon conference centers, to the fields, communities and town halls where alternatives are already growing and a stronger political consensus can be built from the bottom up.”

The top-down approach favored by the U.N. and the international governmental community is showing itself to be not only ineffectual, but morally bankrupt.

2 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 8, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Environment, Politics
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 8, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/08/college-climate-activists-lead-the-way-at-cop-17-in-durban/

Challenging rape culture

In my Gender Studies class this week, we’ve been talking about “rape culture.”  It’s a term that’s bandied about somewhat cavalierly on college campuses, and is probably much less familiar out in the ordinary workaday world.

Well, wake up world.  Rape culture is here.  And it doesn’t need the ironic scare quotes.  It’s real, and it’s not funny at all.

You know you’re living in a rape culture when women’s bodies are suggestively displayed, commodified, in sexually enticing poses obviously intended for the male gaze.

In the culture of rape, “no” means “try harder” and it’s always the woman’s fault if she doesn’t like what’s going on.  Stupid bitch, if she didn’t want it, she shouldn’t have worn those heels/had that drink/come to the party.

Rape culture sanctions violence when necessary to overcome resistance.  She was asking for it, anyway.

Rape culture oppresses dissenting men, too.  Men who fail to conform to the code of dominant masculinity are “faggots,” and being called out as anything akin to feminine–pussy, for example–is the worst insult you can throw at a guy.

Lately I’ve been realizing that rape culture extends a lot further than women’s bodies.  It’s also responsible for the prevailing attitudes towards our environment–our Mother Earth.

Not for nothing are both Mother Earth and Mother Nature gendered female.

Some patriarchal cultures manage to respect Mother Nature while still maintaining a stranglehold on her female children.  For instance, in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I’m re-reading now for another class, the all-powerful Oracle of the Hills, a goddess, is interpreted by a priestess whose pronouncements no men dare question.  This doesn’t stop the protagonist, Okonkwo, from beating up his wives on a regular basis.

In Judeo-Christian and Islamic cultures, the patriarchy dispenses with goddesses.  Or at least, goddesses of the truly powerful, fearsome kind.

In Euramerican cultures, we have sex goddesses, who exist to pleasure their men.  Islamic cultures shroud their women in veils, but towards the same end: women exist to please their men.

The explosive growth of the international pornography industry, in which it is still rare for women’s pleasure to be of any interest at all, bears testimony to the extent to which rape culture rules.

In 2006, the pornography industry had larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined–and it’s only grown in the past five years.

Porn is a vast unregulated jungle.  It’s not all bad.  But some of it is really terrible.  Some of it is sexualized violence–rape–thinly veiled as entertainment.

Yes, the girls get paid.  But many studies have shown that female porn stars often come from sexually abusive childhoods, or are teen runaways, or are lured into the trade through drug addiction and prostitution.

In Euramerican porn, women exist to give men pleasure.  Doesn’t matter if they get fucked over in the process.  Doesn’t matter if all that’s left in the end is a hollow shell.  There’s always another slut waiting in line.

Yeah.  It hurts me to talk like this, but I want to convey the mind-set of this industry.

And then I want you to think about how this mind-set translates to the Euramerican assault on the environment, our Mother Earth.

Or the sub-prime loan scandal (it’s Occupy Foreclosures Day, after all).  Fuck’em over, make a profit and move on.  All that matters is the bottom line, baby.

Sometimes it seems as though the more powerful actual women become in real life–ie, successful at playing the formerly all-male games of education and career–the more frantically obsessive men’s consumption of pornography becomes.  The power they miss in real life, they can find acted out for them in porn fantasies.

But the environment is another story.  Mother Earth is not going to play men’s games–that is, she doesn’t care to beat them at their own game.  When she starts to resist, the game will be over.

In porn, women go along with the game for a variety of reasons.  Generally speaking, women do it to survive.

Likewise, women collude with the patriarchy in the rape of the Earth because it’s just easier to go along than to resist.  And the lifestyle has been pretty comfortable over the last 50 years, hasn’t it.

I would like to see a frank discussion of the connections between rape culture as played out in porn and rape culture as played out between humans and the environment.

We need to acknowledge that there is a serious problem in both the private and the public realms (along these lines, we are just beginning to see confessions of “sex addiction” hit the media.  How about “fossil fuel addiction”?).

The problem is a symptom of much deeper ills in human social relations, which transgress the usual boundaries of race, class, gender & nation.

Why are porn and energy extraction biggest, the fastest growing industries in the world?

What does it mean to live in a rape culture?  Who benefits, and who loses?

Most importantly, how can a rape culture be transformed?  And what is our alternative vision?

My vision is this:

The one-sided model of domination and extraction (“getting some”) needs to shift to a dialogic model of sustainable mutual pleasure.

Human beings should serve in a steward relation to our Mother Earth, tending and enriching her in exchange for the nourishment and pleasure she can afford us.

Likewise, sex should not be about domination and debasement, but about mutual pleasure and uplift.

In these transition times, such a transformative shift should be possible, if each of us begins with our own selves, our own backyards, and lets the ripples of range move outward.

Let it be so.

6 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 6, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Media analysis, New stories, Politics of Gender, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 6, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/06/challenging-rape-culture/

Outsourced pollution rides the trade winds home

How timely, that just as the U.N.-sponsored climate talks are going on in Durban, a new report comes out  from the Global Carbon Project informing us that global greenhouse gas emissions grew by a whopping 5.9 percent last year, the largest leap in any year since the Industrial Revolution began.

The U.S. remains the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, trailing only China.  But as we all know, China has become a factory state of the U.S. and Europe–isn’t virtually every manufactured thing you own “made in China”?

As I hear all the time from travelers to China, air quality is noticeably bad there.  Most cities seem to be in a permanent miasma of smog, sometimes approaching the sooty fog Charles Dickens used to describe as veiling London in the coal-burning 19th century.

Here in the U.S., air quality has improved since I was a kid in New York, when smog was a daily occurrence and you just learned to live with noxious blue bus fumes blown in your face on every street corner.

But apparently what we’ve done is simply outsource our pollution to China.  Let them deal with the smog over there; we’re paying for the goods they produce aren’t we?  If they can’t figure out how to manufacture cleanly, that’s not our problem.

So goes the smug line of American entitlement.

But welcome to the new century.

First of all, the great American credit bubble has burst, and the middle class is having trouble affording those imported manufactured goods, no matter how “cheap” they are.

Second, it’s obvious that the trade winds are blowing Chinese smog our way, in the form of global climate change that will affect us here as much as it affects them over there.

Politicians the world over continue to take a short-sighted view of both of these issues, imagining that a little re-tooling is going to get us past the bumps in the road.

The media isn’t helping matters–you will have to peer deeply into the New York Times this morning to find the small buried news story about the biggest leap in global carbon emissions on record.

People who are already living on the edge understand the stakes.  Thousands of African women farmers have been marching in Durban, along with indigenous forest defenders from around the globe.  They’ve been kept away from the politicians inside the gates by riot police.

Guess what?  All the riot police in the world cannot keep climate change havoc from our doorstep.  Here in the U.S., in China, in Africa, and all over the world.

It’s time to deal with it.

3 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 5, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Climate Change, Media analysis, Politics
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 5, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/05/outsourced-pollution-rides-the-trade-winds-home/

From occupations to manifestations: Arundhati Roy imagines another world

I was excited to find in my inbox today an interview with one of my favorite women writers of resistance, Arundhati Roy.

Roy may be most famous for her novel, The God of Small Things, but I am most moved by her political writings.  She is the one who coined that very popular saying, which became a motto of the World Social Forum in the 1990s: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

She has been a shrewd and no-holds-barred critic of transnational corporate capitalism for decades now, long before it became a trendy position to take.

As she wrote in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, “So much of what I write, fiction as well as non-fiction, is about the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they’re engaged in.”

Since she’s been thinking about these issues for so long, it’s not surprising that the comments she made to Arun Gupta, published today in “The Guardian,” are right on target.

“I don’t think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination.

“I don’t think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost.

“The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment.

“I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters.

“We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise.

“It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.”

This certainly speaks to the question that has been worrying at me all day today, as news spread of the violent evictions of Occupy encampments in L.A. and Philadelphia.
Once the physical encampments are gone, will the movement die away?
Or can it keep bubbling up in guerilla fashion, as I advocated in an earlier piece on this blog, like the spontaneous street parties of European cities, that materialize, stage an intervention, and then vanish before they can be contained?
Also, what role will the internet continue to play over the winter?  Perhaps we should be moving from a stage of “occupations” to a new stage of “manifestations,” where the focus will be not on resistantly occupying a physical territory, but on proactively gathering, both virtually and actually, to manifest a new vision of social relations.
In the Guardian interview, Roy ends by pointing to indigenous people, and people who live close to the land, as key mentors in the days and months and years ahead.
As climate change and environmental degradation accelerates,  Roy says, “we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
“That is why we must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.”
There are many of us who are now waking up to the certain knowledge that the leaders we thought were our trusty guides have been taking us on a joy ride to nowhere, ending up barreling towards a cliff.
There have been those all along who have refused to go along for the ride, who have maintained their independent imaginations and worldviews despite intense efforts by the corporate capitalist world to beat them down.
Those are the people we need to heed now–if, as Roy says, we want to learn “the secrets of sustainable living” and survive.  And if, of course, they’ll have us.
1 Comment
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 1, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Environment, Politics, Resilience, Social change
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 1, 2011

https://bethechange2012.com/2011/12/01/from-occupations-to-manifestations-arundhati-roy-imagines-another-world/

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