Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feminism. Show all posts
Thursday, 29 March 2018
Released
Well, as we head into a long Easter weekend here in Joburg, I can only say that it has been an incredibly...interesting week. So far, anyway.
Starting from a base of sudden radical worldwide distrust for all things digital - and Facebook in particular - my personal world wide web experience only slid rapidly downhill from there.
On Twitter, I was wont to engage in many a "conversation" between radfems on the one hand and transgender activists on the other.
Yes - I have a bias in this field. It is the bias which informs me that humans do not change their sex - especially after marrying, siring several children and hitting male menopause - and that this is a broad biological fact (nuanced I'll grant and nothing is quite that cut-and dried but a general rule nonetheless) and that males who believe, against all the evidence, that they were "born in the wrong body" and are suddenly really women have pain and brokenness I can only guess at, but that this disturbance should under no circumstances grant them a free pass into females' safe spaces, dressing rooms, toilets, girl-guide organisations and sports. Not to mention All-Women party Lists.
Well and so at one stage, fed up with the death threats, the vile name-calling and the general abusive-male-type behaviour from the transgender Twitterati, I called a member of the UK Green Party (who call women "non-men") "a broken human being". This earned me, after a couple of days, a 12-hour suspension from my Twitter account.
I went along with the instructions to delete the "violent" tweets and was reinstated. Ho, dear blogger community, but what did I do then but proceed to call the same Green Party transwoman a broken man. 7-day lock out.
I uninstalled Twitter from all my devices and felt an uncommon sense of having been released. From the cesspit, dear Goddess, deliver us. Even if it takes a huge whack across the chops to do so.
Not having my nose in Twitter has hugely cleared my head. I am even leaning towards taking up regular blogging again; you know, that environment in which we can use vastly more than 280 characters to say what we need to say, where our peers are not deranged, where we can witness the exceptional and beautiful use of the English language again and at bloody last.
The same day on which I recognised this growing tendency to return to sanity, I read a comment left, unnoticed, on my mirror blog (aquilakahecate.wordpress.com) from a fellow blogger I hadn't heard from in many years, and rekindled a conversation.
In addition, my wonderful, intelligent and emotionally highly competent son seems to have started up blogging again within the last few days - see my sidebar, "Finding My Routes".
Resolving to notice once more when the universe is trying to get my attention, I leave you, dear blogger community, with a wish-promise to reconnect with you again in the near future - for I believe that this is the future trend for those of us who still cling, however tenuously, to our Earthly sanity.
Friday, 8 March 2013
Fish And Water
It's International Women's Day and here in South Africa, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 8 hours.
It's International Women's Day, and female scientists are still earning considerably less than their male peers.
It's International Women's Day, and women are being killed as "Witches" in higher numbers than ever before. Never mind the "Burning Times". We have a real, present holocaust on our hands here.
The reasons? Doubtless they are many, or could be presented as many by people far more qualified than I in social science matters. But, for my own curiosity, I have a one-word catchall answer to the why of it: the Patriarchy. You're stewing in it, and have been for thousands of years, so that you often don't see it for what it is.
The patriarchy: that ignoble structure which has its roots deep in the big monotheistic religions of today, as well as in agriculture, civilization and city-building, and of course the Wetiko disease.
The patriarchy: whose reign degrades and hurts men as well as simply killing women.
It's not going away any time soon. Not so long as most of us are as unaware of it as a fish is of water.
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