It came in the form of comments on a CNN article about underage sex trafficking online (bizarro world moment; CNN admitting that human trafficking exists?), though you can find the same comments in any discussion involving women and/or sex. My wife tipped me off to the article and comments, and both of us about lost our lunches before we even had a chance to eat them.

Some of the more disturbing examples from the most recent comments (as of 10:30 EST this morning) are reproduced below.

“Our children would be safer if prostitution were legal.
When I hear of a 30+ year old man living with his parents whose only income is driving a school bus, I get nervous. If I knew this man could get his ‘needs’ met at a legal facility staffed by trained professionals, I would be less nervous”

The declaration that “our children would be safer if prostitution were legal” hinges on the notion that men purchase women to fulfill a “need”, the same as going to the grocery store or stopping at a gas station, and that women gladly hand over their bodies for that “need”. The idea that men have to rape women to get their “needs” met is as old as agriculture, but it got a very successful spin when the liberal male crowd decided to take over feminism and use it as their personal meat market. Now those “needs” are happily met by women with their own “need” to be enslaved and abused, according to modern fun feminism. All women want any sex from any man at any time, and if they don’t, they’re frigid and possibly religious conservatives.

Which is nothing less than the entrenchment of rape, the systematic assault of every woman on the planet. You’re not free to choose to say “no” if saying “no” has more and greater immediate, negative consequences than capitulating.

And that’s not even getting into trafficking. No, the “free to choose” bit is what your middle school daughters have to deal with in between attempts by men to use and sell them for sex.

“Everybody pays for it…in some way or an other…whether you want to keep the transaction straightforward or you want to get married and give alimony, your house, you car, her lawyer fees and half your net worth is your choice.”

Yeah, I hope she took more than that, pal. You know you made her completely financially dependent on you if the court actually gave anything close to that much in the divorce. Funny, but that sort of split-down-the-middle thing doesn’t count the fact that her résumé probably doesn’t give her anything close to equitable earning power, or that all the credit history is almost certainly in your name, right?

I guess that’s the price you have to pay to get sex on demand, though. Boy, aren’t you glad you don’t have to deal with that crazy woman and her crazy idea that she’s more than just a push-button fuckhole at your service?

But we’re talking about child sex trafficking here, so the real issue is that you just equated having to pay alimony with purchasing a twelve-year-old for sex.

“well as long as women are rewarded for having children out of wedlock and for divorcing their husbands we will have this problem and it will get worse”

The assumption is that women should not have children without a man in control – wait, that women should not go without a man in control, period. And somehow, if men (the ones who are purchasing children for sex) are in control of women, “this problem” will be all fixed.

“What makes most older women sick is the fact that they didn’t cash in on their bodies when they were young. Trust me…women hate each other. They know that their idiot husbands will eventually leave them for a younger woman so they want to harp on the age difference.”

Yeah, ladies, why weren’t you looking for unattractive, self-absorbed rapists to give someone else fifty bucks in exchange for the chance to hurt you, fuck you, spit on you, beat you, make you wish you were dead? Why didn’t you cash in? You’re just jealous of all those other women who knew better.

Why are the husbands idiots? For not already being with a “younger woman”. In the context of a news article about child rape. “Younger woman”. Women only say that this is wrong because of “the age difference” reminding them of how old and floppy they are. Of course men want to fuck children! They’re not old!

And note also: “harp”, as in “harpy”, a mythological creature known for being ugly and eating people.

“If you don’t want to be a prostitute, take student loans, go to college, work hard and get a job. Who’s stopping you?”

Maybe her pimp? Maybe the fact that twelve-year-olds generally don’t take out student loans? Maybe you’re a victim-blaming shitbag?

“There are too many modern factors in the country that permit this sort of things, pointing the finger at a pimp and a website is nothing but lazily scape-goating the “usual suspects” while the bigger culprits (including her parents) walk free.”

The pimp is just a victim, and the parents are the true criminals! If only they weren’t poor / uneducated / non-white!

“Don’t let anyone fool you, if they sell themselves for money, they enjoy getting paid to getting laid. But they will never admit it in the open.”

He is saying this about middle school girls. He is saying that middle school girls are secretly waiting for the chance to be raped. And he seems to think that they’re the ones who get the money for it.

——————–

Even with adult prostitution, men who purchase women for sex will never have any guarantee of her consent. The chance that she’s a willing Happy Hooker™ is slim. Not that men ever try to determine whether it’s consensual or not. After all, the point is to use another person without regard for her personhood or agency, which is rape. If you’re raping someone, you don’t care about whether she “wants it”.

But we’re talking about the imprisonment, sale, and rape of children. And these men are saying the same shit that they say to defend the Happy Hooker™ myth.

Women, please, please consider pushing men out of your world. Please consider buying communal property and establishing women-only spaces everywhere you can. Please wire them up with fingerprint locks, cameras, perimeter alarms. Please establish women-only security forces and arm them. Please grow your own food and raise your own animals. Please get elected. Please only do business with other women.

Men, die.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a gamer blog which has three anti-doodbro posts in a row. Pretty nifty. Written by a male, which gave me mixed feelings – it’s one more voice among the XY crowd, but I would dearly love to see some female-written gamer blogs with the occasional feminist post. Maybe they’re out there, hidden, waiting to be discovered.

The three posts in question on The Seven-Sided Die, in chronological order:

Paizo’s response to criticism of their portrayal of women
GenCon “reaches out” in the spirit of “inclusiveness”
Satire explained

Lately, I’ve been observing male behavior in groups control. Every once in awhile a woman will bring her husband or boyfriend to a woman’s event. What I notice, is that within a women’s culture, when men are the distinct minority (usually one guy and say 14 women), they sit there in silence. They say virtually nothing, and are seemingly incapable of carrying on any conversation at all in this atmosphere. Why the women bring these men is beyond me, since they contribute almost nothing to the group.

So I think, men have really got to gather on their own and figure out how they intend to end all the rape and mayhem. I think they have to seriously work on their almost non-existent social skills, and really learn to carry on real conversations with women that don’t involve their domination.

In women only settings, the non-violence and happiness is apparent. It’s very easy for this spiritual connection to flourish.

Without women, I think men might have to seriously rethink just about every thing. Without stealing women’s “facilitation energy” they would have to truly converse as equals.
At this time in evolution, I don’t think men have much of a spiritual nature at all. They have succeeded in really making the world unlivable in so many areas. They can’t even converse on women’s terms, and if they can’t even do that, what will they do to end this nightmare of male supremacy world wide?

Hell, we men can’t converse with each other on men’s terms. There’s no equals among ourselves. Men create hierarchy wherever we go, and everything we do, say, and think is within that hierarchical framework. Since we’re so concerned with how our words and actions will place us in the hierarchy relative to the men around us, we can’t achieve sincerity and honesty.

So when faced by a room full of women, with no men around to do the hierarchy dance with, men freeze up. We don’t know how to read women’s language, and without men around as a hierarchical reference, we aren’t having our place in the world affirmed by a “person” (read: male; women do not qualify as persons to men). Even worse, we’re in a room full of women and none of them are telling us how awesome we are. So we have two options: put ourselves at the bottom of the one-man hierarchy in the room and sulk, or jump to the top of the one-man hierarchy and establish our dominance, either by derailing the conversation or asserting controlling body language over the woman to whom our presence in the group is attached (hereafter Girlfriend, because girlfriends and wives are going to get it a lot worse than mothers, friends, and other relatives – though sisters come close).

And we can’t just breathe a sigh of relief when the conversation’s over. No, we’ve been slighted, and such slights must be punished. First, we’ll rectify our unmanning in front of Girlfriend. We put down the things that the other women said, usually with an ugly character assessment thrown in.

Then the punishment begins. Any future interaction with, discussion about, or mere mention of the women present will bring out a gorilla response. “Seriously? Lily said that on Facebook? Just goes to show that she has [personality defect] and [can't handle a simple situation / always chooses inferior men / will never amount to anything / etc.].” We trot this out at the first mention in order to forestall any expression of solidarity by Girlfriend. Girlfriend understands the unspoken choice: either defend a woman against an immediate, violent response by a man, or protect herself from the same violent response.

And worse is when Girlfriend made the mistake of saying something which might have trod upon our ego. Something small, perhaps a tiny anecdote. Really, all it takes is mentioning Our Holy Manliness without also making sure to mention how awesome we are. Because if we’re spoken of without glowing terms attached, that’s the same thing as being put down and ridiculed. Woe betide Girlfriend if she slips up in that department. We’ll be damn sure to punish her as well.

I spent years refining my techniques at dividing the women I wanted to control from their relationships which were beyond my control. This is usually only talked about when discussing physically abusive men and the reasons women don’t leave them. That scenario is simply the more overt example of men’s relationships with women in general. When my male friends in high school and I talked with each other about women, we were doing two things: reaffirming ourselves as totally awesome, and trading techniques for isolating and demeaning women in order to make them dependent on us. We never came out and said that we were doing all of this, though we were explicit about how bros were to be prioritized over hos, and we had vague ideas about what we should and shouldn’t take from girls and women.

When I read “facilitation energy” in SheilaG’s comment, something clicked. There were times where I was exposed to all-female conversation in school as the only male present, and many of these conversations – pretty much the ones in which I had the sense to stay quiet – had mind-altering qualities. They felt familiar and alien; they opened my head and shut down my conscious mind. I felt hopeful and determined and enlightened. It wasn’t always the quality of the topic. I think it was just the actual conversation itself, conversation between women who were (for a moment) unhindered by dominance-establishing behavior, with all the data flashing by through channels I didn’t even know existed.

I have a feeling that SheilaG was talking about the energy which women deliberately expend on men to prop men up so that we can engage in normal behavior without totally embarrassing ourselves, going on a violent rampage, or staying in one spot and drooling until we starve to death. But I never felt more facilitated than when I was in a transcendent state, and the most reliable ways to achieve transcendence have always been religious devotion or discussions without men involved, whether listening in on female conversation in school or spending hours talking with my wife.

I think that this energy is necessary for male spirituality. I think that men crave it, and because we crave it, we want to control it. Because we want to control it, we have to do violence to it. We crush it, and we wonder why it doesn’t make us feel the way we wanted to feel when we strangle it into pulp. So we blame the pulp for not making us into the people we wanted to be.

Maybe a long time ago, women saw that men could become something really cool when exposed to the cosmic radiation of their energy, something worth keeping around, worth befriending and loving, worth trusting. We took that opportunity away from ourselves when we extended grabbing claws and swinging fists to take what we wanted. We did it collectively by establishing patriarchy, and we do it individually – I do it, and other men do it as well – when we reinforce patriarchy and engage in dominance-establishing and control-seeking behavior.

(Trigger warning, non-graphic, for subject matter involving the sale and rape of minors.)

Craigslist is profiting from human trafficking, and they are unapologetic.

This has been an issue for years, but it came to a media head last week. On Wednesday, August 4, CNN posted this story, followed by a report on AC360. On Friday, August 6, MC and AK, two girls who were sold by pimps hundreds of times on Craigslist to eager rapists in cities across the US, published an open letter as a half-page ad in the Washington Post. (The ad is archived here in PDF form by the Rebecca Project.)

They took the weekend to mull it over, but the folks at Craigslist responded in an open letter of their own on the site blog. Here is their compassionate, reasoned response:

[...]Would you or the advocacy groups who placed the ads please let us know where the police reports were filed? We have been unable thus far to identify police reports matching the crimes you describe.

[...]craigslist is used by more than 50 million Americans to facilitate billions of interactions each month, and criminal misuse of the site is quite rare.

[...]craigslist is one of the few bright spots and success stories in the critical fight against trafficking and child exploitation. We’ve been told as much by experts on the front lines, many of whom we have met with in person, and many of whom have shared helpful suggestions we have incorporated in our approach.

They first chose to attack the veracity of MC and AK’s account, and by extension the idea that trafficking really occurs all that frequently on Craigslist. They follow up by openly asserting that it’s basically not a problem because it’s “quite rare”. And then they laud themselves with a bit of revisionist history.

Those “helpful suggestions” which they’ve been getting from “experts on the front lines” include Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal subpoenaing Craigslist for evidence that they’ve done a single thing to back up their big talk about screening – screening which only began when the site became embroiled in the aftermath of the murder of a prostitute by a john in Boston, which received much media attention.

The “success story” of Craigslist is only measurable in terms of money. Andrea Powell of the FAIR fund told CNN that “Craigslist is like the Wal-Mart of online sex trafficking right now in this country”. Indeed, AIM Group, an advertising consultancy group, determined in April that 30% – thirty percent – of Craigslist’s revenue is from adult services ads. Of course, that’s including the money that Craigslist had originally promised to give to charity. It reneged on that promise when it began manual screening of the ads. In this site blog post by CEO Jim Buckmaster, he blames the charities for forcing him to pocket all that delicious cash:

craigslist started charging for “erotic services” at the repeated request of law enforcement, some of whom suggested fees of $100 or more. It was our idea to pledge net revenues to charity, an unprecedented pledge that no phone company or newspaper featuring adult ads ever took, and one which subjected us to significant state by-state regulatory burdens. This pledge was met with accusations of dishonesty, and ridicule that we thought any charity would want our “tainted” money. Can anyone blame us for announcing in May 2009 we would not repeat this pledge with adult services? As was made clear a year ago, craigslist will continue to engage in charitable giving, privately, and as we see fit.

Of course, they’re very mum about that private philanthropy, though this New York Times article briefly explores their “charitable” handwaving. Note that at this point in the game, Buckmaster is still willing to admit that Craigslist had to be dragged kicking and screaming by “law enforcement” (read: 80% of the attorneys general of the United States) into doing something to curb prostitution and human trafficking.

If Craig and Jim are so confident that their site is a “bright spot” in all this, then why did they preemptively seek exemption from prosecution before they were ever charged with a crime by South Carolina AG Henry McMaster (one of the 40 AGs who leaned on Craigslist) – so preemptively, in fact, that their suit was thrown out on Friday?

(As a final note: Last year, I learned about Kijiji and considered using their service. Kijiji, now eBay Classifieds, used the past couple year’s scrutiny on Craigslist to promote itself as a personals-free site. Kijiji is an outgrowth of Marktplaats.nl, a similar site which has pseudopods all over Europe. eBay started acquiring the Kijiji family in 2004 and spent the next few years getting its tentacles into the online classifieds business. Interestingly, eBay is a minority shareholder in Craigslist, and the two have been battling each other in the courts over issues of competition and trade secrets, to ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s dismay as she runs for governor of California. Given all that entanglement, I think I’ll pass on using eBay’s classifieds for now.)

THE HUMAN TRAFFICKING HOTLINE: 1-888-3737-888

John schools, for those who don’t know – like me, two days ago – are short rehabilitation courses assigned by courts to men who are charged with soliciting prostitution, generally only first offenders. They are analogous to traffic school for moving violations. You know, where your speeding ticket gets reduced to parking and you sit in a conference room at the local VFW for four hours and watch Craig T. Nelson tell you to pay better attention to the road on a video from 1987? It’s that, only for men who pay money to engage in rape and human trafficking.

From all the sources I’ve seen, it looks like the primary focus of john school is on reminding men that they can suffer bad consequences for paying money to rape women, like herpes or their girlfriends getting angry. They talk about how prostitution hurts communities and causes strain on the justice system. Sometimes they might even bother to remind men that not every woman is a Happy Hooker™ and may be trafficked.

The Village Voice ran a May 2005 article which examined “Project Respect”, the john school in Brooklyn. The article is an enlightening read. It recounts how men responded with indignant shouts in their defense when baited by a female officer who “coyly” asks if they believe they were entrapped. The most jarring portion of the class, at least for reporter Aina Hunter, appears to have been photos of diseased genitals. Hunter portrays the personal stories of trafficked women which are given during the course as sob stories which bookend the real material, rather than the center of attention. God knows whether the men even paid attention to them.

Then again, the article goes on to subtly lionize efforts to decriminalize prostitution, so I guess we’re lucky that they even mentioned trafficking at all.

This 1996 New York Times article describes the San Francisco school, the first of the john schools, in the year after its inception. The treatment is less john-flattering than the Village Voice’s, but they describe the lectures as “six hours of abuse” without a tweak of irony. The article closes with this gem:

After class, one man vowed to change his ways. His friends had once told him that it was cheaper to spend $50 on a prostitute than having to spend the time and money dating.

“It’s cheaper financially, but not emotionally,” he said. “I’m going to be working on finding a real girlfriend.”

Because, as we all know, the purpose of having a girlfriend is to use her for on-demand sexual (power) gratification. Boy, did he learn his lesson.

In the 2002 issue of the Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Dr. Stephanie Wahab of the University of Utah wrote “‘For Their Own Good?’: sex work, social control, and social workers, a historical perspective”. The paper looks at a few of the efforts to approach prostitution (here called “sex work”, a flag for pro-prostitution attitudes, because it implies a consensual Happy Hooker™ who of course isn’t trafficked), ranging from the Evangelical social groups of the mid-1800s to john schools of today. Wahab finds that today’s silly focus on the demand side of the problem is rooted in a silly belief that “female sex workers need to be protected from the patriarchal exploitation of women” and that “all sex workers regard themselves as victims of exploitation, and that they are incapable of speaking on their own behalf”.

This is not a fluke of a paper. This attitude is the new feminism, the result of the second wave movement being kicked out by faux-fems. This is the sort of thing you can now read on Feministing and Feministe every day. There’s no such thing as trafficking; fourteen-year-old girls love being raped four or five times a day, ignorance is truth, what about the menz.

In the Village Voice article, perhaps the most telling quote of all is attributed to Juhu Thukral, then the director of the Sex Workers project at the Urban Justice Center: “John schools are part of an effort to address the demand side of the industry, but it’s really just a revolving door.”

Thukral says this in order to support her position that all the shame, guilt, and consequences (for men) should be excised from purchasing women’s bodies for rape. The sentiment is based in the idea that men will be men, that men will always seek to rape women, that if you deny them access to street prostitutes they will simply seek out brothels and escort services. That men are dogs who have no option but rape, and that women are less than dogs and must submit themselves to rape.

Ultimately, that’s what john school is: a cop-out, a little slap on the wrist, a wink and a nod. John school is the idea that men should be allowed to rape women, that they shouldn’t face real consequences. That raping a woman is roughly equivalent to going ten over the speed limit.

Soliciting a prostitute should be a felony equivalent to rape, with the same sentencing guidelines (which ought to be the as harsh as the others of the most violent crimes). As long as men are the ones making, enforcing, and interpreting the laws, this is not going to happen.

In the Times article, a woman rescued from prostitution tells the room about “how much she loathed her customers, wanting to kill one, any one, and even kept a butcher knife in her purse just in case she got the chance”. Sounds like self-defense to me.

Would men pay to rape women if they knew that they might face the death penalty, administered by her own hand?

THE HUMAN TRAFFICKING HOTLINE: 1-888-3737-888

The breakdown: a girl approaches a teacher, Ms. Esther von Waldow, to report that she and another girl were raped by a boy on campus. Ms. von Waldow goes to the principal, Dr. Michael Ghilani, with her first concern being the girls’ safe passage home from school property. Ghilani had other plans.

According to a court filing submitted by the school district, Dr. Ghilani didn’t believe that the students were in danger or that any safety concerns were present. Instead, he thought students were having consensual sex in school after hours.

He devised a plan to have school police officers follow the students in question to determine who they were and where they were going.

Security followed the girls, but they believed the girls had left for the day, presumably after losing track of the girls. (A night officer saw the boy and another girl on campus that evening, but he was unable to track them down.)

That afternoon, while school cops patted themselves on the back for doing their job, the boy raped Jane Doe again, as a direct result of being prevented from returning home. And all because the principal thought he was Kojak.

As usual, the school took the victim-blaming route in response to the lawsuit brought by the girl, saying that the victims – and these victims include previous victims of harassment and assault by this kid in incidents which were known by the school – were actually all in consensual relationships with the rapist, and that they were jealous of each other. Therefore, since the little tramps deserved it, the school didn’t bother reporting any of this shit to the police.

I want to know why Ghilani isn’t up on criminal charges. He looked at a young rape victim and literally saw jail bait.

The school wants the suit thrown out because “the plaintiffs cannot prove the district was deliberately indifferent to the possibility that the student would be assaulted”.

On the Upper St. Clair High website, Dr. Ghilani invites you to email him personally – mghilani@uscsd.k12.pa.us – to receive additional information about the school. I wonder if they have a brochure about their Student Rape Program?

THE HUMAN TRAFFICKING HOTLINE: 1-888-3737-888

1. Female spirituality is the core structure of a sustainable, equitable, harmonious social structure.
2. Male entitlement and power-seeking behavior is the antithesis of a sustainable, equitable, harmonious social structure.
3. If men wish to be allowed to be part of the solution (or to live through the revolution), we must turn to ourselves and begin the long and inevitably painful process of excising our entitlement and power-seeking behavior.
   • As sexuality and sex roles have become the basis of modern society, we must begin by addressing how our entitlement and power-seeking are embedded in those arenas.
4. We must be conscious of and honest about the road which led us here in order to affect true change and keep us vigilant in the future.
5. Voluntary relationships are the expression of human compassion, selflessness, and affirmation. Obligate relationships will not suffice, and no social or legal structure based solely on obligation is sustainable.

We began with a set of related questions: What would men be like without women to put on the brakes? What would a more sustainable society involving men and women look like? What has to happen to move toward that goal?

We’ve examined the first question: men without women. Men are dangerous creatures. If female influence is removed, we act as if we have nothing to keep our flailing, damaged genes in check. We consume everything until we consume ourselves. We create intricate hierarchies to attempt to make the illusion of power a reality. We not only victimize others, but we brainwash our victims to believe that victimization is a desirable state.

On the other hand, men have inherent spiritual natures, and we have the capability to stop trying to control everything and everyone around us and start controlling ourselves. We can become humble, and we can raise our sons without pride and arrogance. We can hone ourselves for the roles which fit us best in a sustainable society. We can show ourselves to be valuable to the women around us. We can withdraw our claws from the world and make way for a better system.

We’ve looked at the second question as well: men with women. We’ve looked at appropriate roles for men – more importantly, we’re seeing how our roles must be externally determined, as a sustainable society is one in which men are not calling the shots and assigning the roles. We’ve looked at sustainable societies in the past. We’ve considered what they will look like in the future.

The third question – how to get there – has been thorniest. It’s the one that doesn’t have a simple answer. We looked at some possibilities, like corporate bodies centered around voluntary relationships, but such approaches are artificial models of a natural state, mere emulations which do not fully realize the true process. Those emulations are baby steps on the way to the real deal.

When it comes down to it, everything that men have done and are doing to ruin the world stems from one thing: expectation.

The idea that men can control objects, resources, people, or concepts is actually the idea that men can declare that they have such control with the expectation that others around them will recognize the declaration and act in accordance.

We expect our desires to be met on demand: food, transportation, entertainment, sex, absolution. We expect our needs to be not only met, but exceeded. We expect to be lauded for existing. We expect everyone else – that is, everyone on the bottom tier, those who have been “feminized” by men – to provide these things for us, and we expect it all with little or nothing required in return.

We expect other people to respond automatically to our whims, like animals or gadgets, and so we force them into labor, into sex, into deference and chains and bowed heads and stunted growth and malnourishment, into living like animals or gadgets all day, every day, keeping us happy and staying out of sight while they do it.

The only thing we don’t expect is for others to place expectations on us. We want the cake without the consequence, and if the cake isn’t coming quickly enough, then someone better get back in the kitchen and start baking before we have to put her in her place. Don’t even think about telling us to bake our own cakes. Men kill for less, and we do it often.

Men use violence to enforce our expectations. We use the threat of violence to ensure that we do not have to actually resort to violence (unless we want to), and that, too, is violence.

What men must do – to be given roles in society, to allow sustainability and social order to grow, to develop spiritually, but most of all because it is the right thing to do and it’s about goddamn time we did it – is stop having expectations.

This is painful. Our society is founded upon male expectation. The definition of “man” in the dictionary (that I just made up which is better than the real dictionary) is “the gender role assigned to those who may act with impunity to bring their expectations to fruition”. It’s so fundamental that giving up expectation is disidentification.

We must erase ourselves and allow our identities to be rewritten by a society which we have no hand in creating.

Now imagine convincing a planet full of assholes to do that. They won’t go for it, so you have two options: baby step after baby step, slowly leading men down the path toward the goal of them not killing everyone in a fit of temper… or global revolution, deposing men everywhere and eliminating them as a threat.

There’s a slim chance that we, men, can enact a third option. It’s possible that enough of us can choose to opt out of manliness and opt into maleness that we can become useful allies to the women who are leading the global push back. It’s possible that we can add our voices and strengths, where we are given the lee to do so, and make it so impossible for men to have their expectations fulfilled that they must give up on the whole idea.  There’s a very slim chance we’ll survive.

I love this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it.

Of course, family units had been growing smaller for a long time – a long, long time. Take a look at this brief paper by the American Economic Association. (Luckily, the important bit is before the Keynesian economic drivel really starts dripping onto the page). It discusses the history in Europe of the sharpest double-edged sword in human history: the corporation.

Most of us now think of corporations in general economic terms – for-profit, non-profit, limited liability, et cetera; or, in history, guilds, expeditionary charters, trading companies, and the like. But the history of the corporation is the story of people coming together in the face of widespread social disorder with the hope of establishing an insulating bubble of order around themselves. Communes, regional defense cordons, extragovernmental guilds and farm shares: these were the first corporations, the foundations for restabilization of national governments, replaced by chartered corporations owned by and managed by those governments.

The problem, of course, is that the entrants into a corporation are rarely on equal footing from the start, and corporations have a very dry, dispassionate, anti-holistic view of their membership.

Now let’s take the original purpose of a corporation – a group of people securing themselves in the midst of a hostile environment – and see what we can do about that squidgy problem with dry and dispassionate governance.

In order to be recognized by the world as a whole, an incorporation takes place in the legal context of society at large. This means that connections between corporate members which are under the aegis of the corporation as a whole have a contractual basis. In modern Western society, that means that relationships between corporate members are defined by the rights and obligations between them.

Eve’s Daughter writes an excellent analysis, the first of its kind I’ve ever seen, on goal-oriented (contractual) relationships, from corporate contracts to the nuclear family. Her post is essential reading. She explores how the rights-and-obligations view of relationships does not reflect the reality of interpersonal (and inter/intracorporate) relations.

ED chooses pregnant women as her example:

A pregnant female does not need goal-specific relationships; she needs indefinite, long-term relationships which are based up on a mutually recognized bond. [...] But this form of bond has no real place in our current legal structure.

ED’s solution is “a method for recognizing bonds which are not based upon set obligations or specific, achievable goals”; in other words, our legal system must be restructured to accommodate voluntary, non-goal-oriented relationships.

Doesn’t that sound like the most radical feminist thing ever? People declaring a bond to each other, without being coerced by an externally imposed obligation, without expectation of gain or reward, without putting a set of conditions or an artificial time limit on the bond?

We are tribal people. We have evolved to live in close groups, moving across the land as a unit. We must rely on each other for survival. Some of us hunt, some of us gather, some of us take up other essential skills, and some of us must simply be cared for by others; the categories frequently overlap. We are tied by obligation.

At our best, though, our tribal groups become families, clans, societies giving rise to spiritual pursuits: art, song, play, dance, story. When we laugh or mourn or marry, it is not out of obligation, but instead the declaration of voluntary reliance.

In the paleolithic era, voluntary relationships grew out of a substructure of obligate relationships. In the developed world of the modern era, we are still interrelated, but we of the rich nations have displaced the responsibilities of those interrelationships onto poor nations. Every time we complain about the price of fifteen dollar tee-shirts, we’re demonstrating that displacement.

So what would it say if we voluntarily took on each others’ burdens, if we formed tribes and broad families and inobligate relationships, when we have already shifted the consequences of our interrelatedness out of our sight? It would be a conscious and declarative act, not a natural outgrowth of our evolution, to recreate the matricentralized tribe – the very thing Valerie Solanas wrote in the quote of my last post: “There’s no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders.” Voluntary obligations would replace externally enforced obligations, which is the opposite of how we live today.

This goes back to the examination of the early European concept of incorporation: banding together as a declaration against the chaos surrounding us. And with women at the fore, it can be done right, with room for improvements and adjustment, seeking to be inclusive and egalitarian, vigilant against consumption from within by power-seeking (male) behavior.

There’s no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders.

Valerie Solanas, “S.C.U.M. Manifesto“

The part that really sticks out for me from the above quote is not “rational beings capable of empathizing”, which is really a condemnation of men’s irrationality and unempathic nature. It’s just declaring the status quo, that men are irrational and unempathic. It’s lateral thinking. What really grabbed me was the next clause: “complete and having no natural reason to compete”. That had the ring of hope. Completion – it sounds achingly satisfying.

Solanas writes elsewhere in her manifesto about males and incompletion: “the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage.” Which got me searching for information about the Y chromosome itself.

It’s disturbing, and therefore fascinating, how rapidly the SRY gene (and the Y chromosome itself) is degrading, and how damaged male genetics have already become. On the other hand, the idea that within ten to fifteen million years we may well evolve a new sex-determining system is pretty awesome. (I wonder if there’s a way to Frankenstein that development sooner?) Wikipedia is the usual place to start reading about the topic, with some interesting links.

We’re primates, great apes. We’re social creatures. We rely on each other to survive, now and at every point in our history. The lone human is so anomalous that we make case studies in fiction of loneliness as a spark for madness.

Given all that, how did we get from interdependence into competition, kept in line only by laws and leaders? (And by “we”, of course that means “men”; women in safe situations with the resources to support each other generally will do so.) When did competition become our way of life, and how did it start?

Agriculture

Agriculture pretty well destroyed humanity by turning social divisions based on sex on their heads and polarizing them to the most extreme boundaries. Not to mention the development of class stratification, the sudden acceleration of environmental destruction, the invention of prolonged war, and other such outgrowths of that divide.

I’ve had an armchair theory for a while that agriculture and its descendant social orders at best have no process by which dangerous men are selected against for gene propagation, that men have been contributing to the degradation of the Y chromosome by designing societies in which their flawed genes become assets. These societies artificially select for dangerous men, men with gene defects, men who have no limiters on their violence, men who pursue control of others at all costs, men who have stunted empathy and a xenophobic outlook; xenophobia being not limited to fear and hatred of those from other societies, but also extending to those who are different in any way: women, men who do not live up to the xenophobe’s ideal of manhood, children, those with differing beliefs… well, you know the drill. All the “isms” of modern society. Men cannot live with fear; the things, the people they fear must be controlled.

Since the start of the Neolithic era, we have been divided by sex to keep men in power, and therefore sex is the lens through which the whole of male life must be viewed. For men, rape is sex, sex is control, and control is a perceived right. Acquisition and centralization of property therefore becomes rape -> sex -> control -> a right: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property happiness”. Respect from others is perceived as control of others, and therefore also follows the rape -> sex -> control -> right paradigm.

See where this goes? Everything that men are supposed to want is their right to take; the acquisition of the desired object or state demonstrates mastery and control; the appropriate method of acquisition is ambition, taking, violence, rape. For men, what’s the difference between a boat, the corner office job, or a woman? They’re all indicative of power and mastery, and they’re all objects, and men have a right to whatever they want to take.

Male self-help authors have long advised other men: “if you desire something, act as if it’s already yours and it will come to you”. Tell me that doesn’t sound like every man at a party with his eyes set on his next “conquest”.

And now this attitude has resulted in the “post-agrarian” world where a few men have acquired all the land, wealth, and objects (human objects included). It has pushed us and our environment to the extreme edge of tolerance. Societies of the common era are more violent, more stratified, more polarized, and more environmentally destructive than ever. There is no evidence that any paleolithic society treated its members so poorly, made war so thoroughly (if at all for most groups), or destroyed everything it touched so completely.

The golden age of humanity passed over a hundred thousand years ago, with agriculture supplanting peace and leisure. We’re in a social speedboat barreling off the edge of the world, driven by man, dragging woman and everything else behind it. “Isn’t waterskiing fun?” he cackles as we plummet to oblivion.

If the golden age were to return, or something like it – if men could live with women, and we could have peace, joy, spirituality, prosperity, and sustainability once again – what would it look like? What could we become?