Women’s Space

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.

What’s so disheartening to me is how few people seemed to recognize this, when it was so obvious!

H/t Jane Evershed on Facebook.

Heart

Former Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential Nominee will participate in an International Peace Conference scheduled to take place in Munich, Germany on February 6 - 7, 2010 while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meets in the same city to plan war. McKinney, a long-time proponent of abolishing NATO, is scheduled to speak on February 6 at a rally to protest the NATO “security” conference. After the rally, McKinney will participate in the International Peace Conference whose schedule and call to demonstrate against NATO war policies are included below.

Included in McKinney’s program is a meeting with the Munich American Peace Committee (MAPC - www.mapc-web.de) which will present to McKinney its third annual award, “Peace through Conscience,” during the ceremonies of the Munich Peace Conference on the evening of February 6, 2010.

The MAPC Peace Prize is normally awarded by the previous year’s winner. In McKinney’s case the honors will be done by André Shepherd, a U.S. Army deserter from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and asylum seeker in Germany. Said McKinney of her selection for the award, “I am humbled to be so recognized. Clearly, the MAPC gave more thought to the significance of those whose struggle for peace is based on principle and an unshakeable commitment, despite the personal sacrificies required, than did the Nobel Peace Committee that rewarded our President for war.” McKinney continued, “In this way of thinking, peace is now war, lies are now truth, and ignorance is strength.”

McKinney calls on Americans across Germany to converge on Munich and protest U.S. and NATO war policies. McKinney will meet with American ex-patriots in multiple meetings while in Munich.

Link, h/t Megan Mackin on Facebook

This is a song of liberation, of deep and anguished longings for justice. Some believe “Babylon” (from the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible) is the United States. Some believe Babylon is the Roman Catholic Church. Some believe Babylon to be colonizers, the rich and powerful. Sinead’s “Babylon” is about child abuse (she herself was abused by her mother); it is the cry of the tortured and battered child.  Babylon, to me, is a metaphor for the powerful, the violent, cruel and corrupt, all those who destroy people, the earth, the skies and oceans, the creatures, who harm and kill the vulnerable and marginalized, and who do not for one moment care about the devastation they cause, who glory in it.

Sinead is magnificent in her resistance, defiance and passion every time she sings this song. From my perspective, she is a hero in a million ways, starting with shaving her head when nobody was shaving their heads, decades ago, continuing on with her fierce and relentless advocacy for battered and abused children, then on to the time she ended a Saturday Night Live performance by ripping up a photo of the Pope and cursing the Roman Catholic Church for its sexual abuse of the innocent.  Along the way, she had four children, each by a different man, because she felt like it.  And all the while she created amazing, passionate, brilliant song after amazing, passionate, brilliant song. She is an amazing, incredible woman who made her own life with her own hands.  I find during this time of my life, I can’t get enough of her music.

She took my father from my life oh
Took my sister and brothers oh
I watched her torturing my child
Feeble I was then but now I’m grown
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon …

Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered
Let them also that hate him flee before him
As smoke is driven away, so drive them away
As wax melteth before the fire
So let the wicked flee before the Lord

Heart

The Metamorphosing Sage rides her Rage.  It is her broom, her Fire-breathing, winged mare.  It is her spiraling staircase leading her where she can find her own Kind, unbind her mind.

Rage is not a “stage.”  It is not something to be gotten over.  It is transformative, focusing Force.  Like a horse who streaks across fields on a moonlit night, her mane flying, Rage gallops on pounding hooves of unleashed Passion.  … As the ocean roars its rhythms into every creature, giving birth to sensations of our common Sources/Courses, Rage too makes senses come alive again, thrive again. — Mary Daly, Pure Lust:  Elemental Feminist Philosophy, 1984

Read about it here.  The justification is, tourism is all that is left of the “economy” in Haiti, so really, it’s a good thing.

I liked the following comment from the comments thread (buried amongst comments defending rich people who refuse to allow a little nothing like a devastating earthquake and thousands of dead people in the streets ruin their holiday):

Migrant Woman by Dorothy Lange, Library of Congress

Click to listen to \”Woman of the Well\” by Chiwonisu

It is a winter morning
The ground feels rocky and cold
Beneath her cracked and bare feet.
The woman comes to the well
limping over scattered bones.
She is weary and tired.

And this life grinds upon her,
This life of endless toil
She is weary and tired,
and all dreams are forgotten.

Where do the dreams go?
Where do the dreams go?
It seems sometimes life takes more than you have;
It seems sometimes life takes more than you have.

It is a cold wind that blows
Over the lost forgotten souls
Very far and away.
Fearless woman of the well
walks across the empty land.
It’s cold and lonely.

And this life grinds upon her,
This life of endless toil
She is weary and tired
and all dreams are forgotten.

Chiwoniso

Via Autumn Two Bulls on Facebook:

…Lakota Families need your support in getting propane to heat their homes as they are out of heat or on the verge of being without heat. The winter weather here in South Dakota can be very brutal and harsh with temperatures going as low as 30 degrees below zero…

• Pine Ridge Teen suicide rate is 150 times higher than the National Average
• 65% of the residents of the Reservation live in sub-standard conditions with no electricity, running *water, and often, without heat
• Many of the elderly (some of whom still live in sod houses) die of hypothermia each year
• Average annual income is $2,600 to $3,500
• Due to lack of sustainable jobs on the reservation, unemployment is approximately 85-95%
• Infant mortality rate is 300% above National Average
• There are NO commercial, industry or technology infrastructures on the reservation to provide employment
• Diabetes is 800 times higher than the National Average

If you want to donate to a family please  call:

Lakota Plains Propane Company
Phone# 1-605-867-5199
Phone# 1-605-455-1188
They accept all major credit cards and debit cards.  The minimum amount they require in order to deliver propane is $120 per household.

I’ve blogged about the amazing women of the Pine Ridge Reservation a number of times over the past few years including here, here, here and here.  I’m passing along this request because women, children, and the elderly, in particular may die without heat; some are said to be burning clothing in an attempt to keep warm.  The current temperature in Pine Ridge is 26 degrees with a low expected today of 5 degrees.

Obama’s Indian Problem

Tidiness has been enforced upon women, both as passive recipients and as possessed instruments.  As passive recipients women absorb tidings of tidiness– of tracked, tamed, linear thinking and feeling, enforced through injections of potted fear and other pseudopassions.  As instrumental cooperators, women themselves become token tyrants of tidydom.  Confined to the domains/chains of kitchen, office, schoolroom, hospital ward, shopping mall, women exercise pseudo-authority cleaning and tidying, making their world trimmer, grimmer, fearfully ‘cheerful,” tear-full.  Escaping home and the range to join male-led “movements,” a woman finds herself in the same domestic role, cleaning up messes made by others.  “Relaxing” in front of her tidy television set, she stares at images fashioned to tidy her brain.  Boxes of  “Tide” clutched by smilingly spick-and-span fembots jump off the screen to scour her mind.  “Tide’s in, dirt’s out,” Down the spout, down and out.  Down the drain, heart and brain.  Dirt off the shirt; off with her head.  Ding-dong, the wicked Witch is dead.  No complex grief or sorrowing here, just clean dismembering of her Tidal powers, her indwelling Demon, Genius…

Stendhal expressed an accurate perception of the sadostate’s tidying of women when he wrote:  “All the geniuses who are born women are lost to the public good.”  An Other way of Naming the atrocity is to say that every woman who has been cut off from her Genius has become lost from her Self, our Selves.  — Mary Daly in Pure Lust

Suki Falconberg, whose essays I have posted here as often as she has sent them to me, e-mailed me this, her most recent essay, a while back while my blog was passworded.  It’s excellent, as Suki’s writings unfailingly are.  Given that her topic is language, this essay seems especially timely, too, in light of Mary Daly’s recent passing.  Thanks again, Suki — Heart

… I always call the men who do the buying ‘customer-rapists’ or ‘client-rapists.’  I try to make this standard language usage in all I write, along with the term ‘prostitution-rape.’  It’s tough, since I, too, have been indoctrinated with inaccurate words.  I find myself using ‘work,’ as in ‘when I worked as a prostitute,’ since I cannot find any other way to express it.  But I am trying.

Language is enormously important.  I find myself having to create new words and phrases to try to express the harsh realties of prostitution and sex trafficking–and the oppression of female sexuality.   A common definition of a prostitute is “a woman who engages in promiscuous sex for money.”  Look up the word in major dictionaries and you find it synonymous with “loose woman” or other such judgmental phrasings.  Every definition has not just a male bias (being based on man’s privileged sexuality) but also a moral-majority bias:  the “respectable” people of the world (both men and women) judging the sexual outcast and labeling her with words that indicate her worthlessness.

For openers, I would change the standard definition of prostitute to something like “a girl or woman who is sold for sex.”  This needs to be refined, of course, since it is in the passive voice and so leaves out the real villains:  those doing the selling and the men who do the buying.  But for the moment I’ll let it stand.  It’s a start in reversing the language bias.

You will notice that in the realm of non-prostituted women there is no word for any kind of open, free, non-repressed, non-imprisoned, un-enslaved female sexuality.  If you are a woman and you voluntarily sleep with a lot of men, you are still ‘promiscuous.’  A slut.  The only synonym I have found is ‘non-monogamous.’  I suppose this choice is an attempt to be neutral and non-judgmental.  But what an ugly word.  It sounds like a strangled mongoose.  I have yet to invent my own word that would express a beautiful, free, unafraid female sexuality where a woman can joyfully fuck as many men as she wants to—without all of society coming crashing down around her ears.  And it would come crashing down—since, for such a sexuality to exist, we would have to reinvent the whole world:  it would mean the demise of patriarchal religion, among other radical changes—but this is material for other articles and these are subjects I have commented on liberally elsewhere.  So let’s get back to language.

I like the word ‘whore.’  It has been used as a “term of opprobrium” (as they say) for centuries in order to keep us women in our place.  ‘Whore’ is spit at us as the ultimate insult.  Actually, what is a whore?  She is the ‘prostituted’ and the ‘trafficked.’  She is the girl broken in rape camps and put to fuck use for the pleasure of men, with no regard for her own life or being.  After the breaking in, she might be ‘turned out,’ in obscenely revealing clothes and grotesque make-up and those torture devices called high heels, in order to work the streets in Rome or New York or Athens—I am just giving you a random, typical scenario.  It might sound like it comes out of a movie, that typical Hollywood-manufactured painted streetwalker—but she really does exist.  As ‘whore,’ she is surface, an end-product, doing her mechanical blow jobs in cars or alleyways, taking her fuck quota for the night so her pimp won’t beat her ragged.  She is pretty much spat at, or just ignored by the rest of us.   For the well-dressed with their cinnamon lattes in hand, she is simply not there.  She is, in one Japanese phrase for prostitute, ‘a woman of no importance.’

To me the whore is the most pathetically scorned, insulted, abused, battered, violated creature on the planet.  Yet she has made it—somehow.  She is still alive.  So to be called a ‘whore’ for me is a point of pride.  I would rather use it than ‘prostitute’ or ‘prostituted being’ since to appropriate it is to defuse the sheer ugly power it has had over us for centuries.

And, for me, as a former prostitute, to be called a whore certainly beats being called a ‘sex worker.’  That supposedly neutral phrase is an abomination when applied to most of the bought and sold women and girls in the world—what they do, the rape they have inflicted on them,  does not even vaguely resemble ‘work.’  ‘Sex worker’ is a cover-up phrase thought up by academics wanting to be cutesy and PC, I think.

Show me a ‘sex worker’—someone who sells sex in complete safety; someone who is respected by her society for her ‘profession’ (whether she works in New York or Las Vegas or Bangkok or Dubai or Melbourne—add any city in the world to this list); someone who is never subjected to any kind of violence or humiliation–and I will concede some accuracy to the phrase.  But until we change prostitution so that it conforms to the above definition for all women and girls in it, then it cannot be called ‘sex work.’  As a highly sexual woman, I would welcome a form of prostitution that allowed me to expand the beauty of my sexuality while being paid for it.  Not yet on this planet.  The majority of women and girls in prostitution ‘work’ under conditions that are far from free or beautiful:  sexual violence, humiliation, other kinds of physical violence, debt bondage, control by owners or pimps or family members who take the money—these are not uncommon elements in the lives of prostitutes.  In fact, women working in prostitution under conditions that are completely free from coercion or violence are rare.  I hold that since most of prostitution is exploitative, it cannot be called ‘sex work.’ Continue Reading »

This song has had me smiling through my tears and in my grief and mourning all week long. How do people survive without music?

Lift me, won’t you lift me above the old routine
Make it nice, play it clean, Jazzman

When the Jazzman’s testifyin’
A faithless man believes
He can sing you into paradise
Or bring you to your knees
It’s a gospel kind of feelin’
A touch of Georgia slide
A song of pure revival
And a style that’s sanctified

Jazzman, take my blues away
Make my pain the same as yours
With every change you play
Jazzman, oh, Jazzman

When the Jazzman’s signifyin’
And the band is windin’ low
It’s the late night side of morning
In the darkness of his soul
He can fill a room with sadness
As he fills his horn with tears
He can cry like a fallen angel
When risin’ time is near

Jazzman, take my blues away
Make my pain the same as yours
With every change you play

Oh, lift me, won’t you lift me with every turnaround
Play it sweetly, take me down, oh, Jazzman

Carole King is an amazing, amazing talent from my generation.
Heart